"Nannygate" is a popular term for the 1993 revelations that caused two of President Bill Clinton's choices for United States Attorney General to become derailed.
In January 1993, Clinton's nomination of corporate lawyer Zoë Baird for the position came under attack after it became known that she and her husband had broken federal law by employing two people who had immigrated illegally from Peru as a nanny and chauffeur for their young child.
The following month, Clinton's choice of federal judge Kimba Wood for the job was leaked to the press, but within a day it became known that she too had employed someone who had immigrated illegally to look after her child.
Determined to choose a woman for the Attorney General post, Clinton finally selected state prosecutor Janet Reno, who was confirmed and served through all eight years of the administration.
The Nannygate matter caused wealthy Americans to ask each other if they too had a "Zoë Baird problem", as the hiring of illegal aliens and the paying of household help off the books were both commonplace.
[5] His choice, whose nomination was announced on December 24, 1992, was Zoë Baird, a 40-year-old senior vice president and general counsel at Aetna Life and Casualty Company who had previously worked in the Justice Department during the Carter administration.
[5][12] On January 14, 1993, a page-one story in The New York Times broke the news[10] that Baird had hired a married pair of illegal aliens from Peru, Lillian and Victor Cordero, between 1990 and 1992.
[13] Baird had brought forward this information willingly to transition officials and authorities performing background checks; she said that she had thought that the fact that they were sponsoring the couple for citizenship made the hiring acceptable, and that they could not pay the taxes for people who were not yet in the country legally.
[19] As Guardian U.S. correspondent Martin Walker later wrote, "[Baird and Gewirtz] were the overpaid yuppies and ubiquitous lawyers whom American voters had come to resent.
[23] A USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll showed that 63 percent of the American public did not think Baird should be confirmed;[25] the reaction was broad, with majorities of Republicans and Democrats, men and women, and young and old all opposing it.
[26] Clinton faced a choice of either quickly jettisoning her, and risk appearing weak, or defiantly continuing to back her, and opposing a popular groundswell; he opted to wait and see a little more.
[10] A growing number of senators came out in opposition to Baird during the day, including two Republican members of the Judiciary Committee and influential centrist Democrats John Breaux of Louisiana and David Boren of Oklahoma.
[19] While Lillian and Victor Cordero had done their jobs well (before hiring them, Baird had made several attempts to employ U.S. citizens, but none had worked out),[7] on January 22 the INS said it sought to question them and very likely deport them.
[35] Wood, who was prominent in New York social circles,[38] was married to Time magazine writer Michael Kramer and the couple had a six-year-old son.
[4][41] Nevertheless, the White House feared reaction from Congress and the public, as well as that from radio and television talk shows, in the apparent, if not actual, repetition of the Baird controversy, and asked Wood to withdraw.
[4] On February 8, Stephanopoulos broadened the scope of the affair by announcing that the past hiring of an illegal alien would "probably be disqualifying" for applicants to any of the 1,100 presidential appointments that were subject to confirmation by the Senate.
[44] Carol Browner, Clinton's pick for Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency and someone who did have a young child, avoided Nannygate problems by simply never having used a nanny.
[48]) In making the announcement, Clinton said that he had considered men for the post and that "I never felt hamstrung by any commitment, even though I did want to name a woman Attorney General.
A cover of Time magazine, featuring a half-portrait of Baird, was titled "Clinton's First Blunder" and subtitled "How a popular outcry caught the Washington elite by surprise".
"[1] And the timing of the announcement of the Wood withdrawal detracted attention from the signing of the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993, the first legislative achievement of the Clinton administration.
[1] The failure of the Baird and Wood picks, along with Lani Guinier's failed nomination (for unrelated reasons) to Assistant Attorney General for Department of Justice Civil Rights Division a few months later, made Congressional Democrats cautious in endorsing future Clinton personnel choices.
"[32] The practice had grown as both married women with children and single working mothers entered the workforce in large numbers during the 1980s, with the extended hours and long commutes of many professional positions further exacerbating it.
[65] The February 10, 1993, op-ed page of The New York Times, which carried considerable Nannygate coverage in general, was exclusively devoted towards discussing it as a women's issue.
[68] Sampson concluded that "The dissonance between Baird's rhetorical stance and her lived life was jarring" and that her case presented "culturally accepted signifiers of a bad mother".
[68] A modified and fictionalized account of the Baird nomination formed the core of Wendy Wasserstein's 1996 play An American Daughter, which was later made into a 2000 television film.
[60] Taunya Lovell Banks, Professor of Equality Jurisprudence at University of Maryland School of Law, saw Nannygate as also having a racial dimension, in that it illustrated how the professional class exploited domestic workers of color.
[67]) The full procedure for handling payments of Social Security and Medicare taxes, as well as state and federal unemployment insurance premiums, for household and child-care help remained quite complex, however, and over the following two decades, self-help articles were published with titles such as "How to Avoid Your Very Own Nannygate"[71] and "Time to Come Clean"[72] and with admonitions like "we all know what happened to Kimba Wood and Zoë Baird.
[63] In December 2004, Bernard Kerik was nominated by President Bush to succeed Tom Ridge as United States Secretary of Homeland Security.
By 2009 and the stepping down of Nancy Killefer as nominee for Chief Performance Officer of the United States at the beginning of the Obama administration, at least ten top-level cabinet or other federal appointees had run into trouble over failure to pay the "Nanny Tax".
[82] In 2009, Canadian member of parliament Ruby Dhalla was accused of having employed nannies without proper work permits as required of anyone hiring foreign nationals under the federal caregiver program,[83] and some newspaper headline writers dubbed the resulting controversy as "Nannygate".