Carol Moseley-Braun's day to talk about race: a study of forum in the United States Senate.

• Author: Butler, John
• Position: Special Issue: Argumentation and the U.S. Senate

This essay examines the events of July 23, 1993 in both the Judiciary Committee and on the floor of the United States Senate. Senator Carol Moseley-Braun, who referred to the day as "my day to get to talk about race," was involved in two events. Both were highly publicized, one as a failure, the other as a major success. The "day" invites the attention of the rhetorical critic, an opportunity to examine both a space not so clean as well as a moment of spontaneous and passionate expression in one of America's most celebrated forums for public argument.

A modern rhetorical forum, according to Thomas Farrell, is "a space of engagement where in the modern constraints of rhetorical culture might assert themselves." This rhetorical culture is a "common definition of places for the invention and perpetuation of meaning" (p. 277). Forum is here being introduced as a modality for understanding the significance of two events occurring both on the floor and in the committee chamber of the United States Senate. The forum has a normalized condition in so far as it "provides loose but recognizable admission criteria as to who may speak, what may be spoken about, and how they are to be held accountable for what they say and do" (p. 288). As Farrell states, "each of these sets of constraints may be subsumed under the larger category of the appropriate," which itself is "continually being reindividuated and renewed with every specific case" (pp. 288-289). That is to say, the norms which determine appropriate rhetorical practice, while being very normalized, are themselves challenged by the participants in each situation-specific case. Such challenges evoke norms for speakers, messages, and constituencies, or the norms of authority, integrity, and conscience (pp. 288-289). The following is a look at two such specific cases.

The essay is an analysis of public argument which, while beginning and ending on one day, is affected by public controversies both latent and undeveloped, in part due to the constraints of the immediate normative forum in which they take place as well as the larger society which accommodates this forum. Born out of the rhetoric are conclusions which reveal telling attributions of the highly normalized forum of America's highest legislative body.

Some observations are important at the outset. First, both of these issues surface on the same day and involve, as their central pressure point, the issue of race. It is impossible to ignore the inevitable potential of one episode informing the other in the mind of the rhetor. Second, unique to the carefully calculated moments of Senate argumentation, both are unanticipated by Moseley-Braun and her contemporaries. In such a constrained forum, tendency toward careful anticipation is the norm. The fact that both episodes take the primary rhetor by surprise is relatively unique. The resulting rhetoric is fresh and uncalculated - at times even unpolished - making it impossible to dismiss as the orchestrated antics of politicians manipulating their colleagues. The reactions are as telling as the actions - revealing a Senate fundamentally unprepared for such a subject in the hands of such a rhetor.

THE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE MEETING

On the morning of July 22, 1993, freshman Senator from Illinois, Carol Moseley-Braun joined the seventeen other members of the Senate Judiciary Committee for the third of four hearings on the nomination of Ruth Bader Ginsburg to be Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah entered into a line of inquiry on the subject of judicial activism by reminding the Judge of the 1857 case Dred Scott v. Sanford. Hatch argued, "the Court invented out of thin air a right to own slaves in the territories" against which the Judge argued, "it was an entirely wrong decision" (Hearing, pp. 269-270). In addition to Dred Scott and Roe v. Wade, Hatch discussed the 1930's case, Lochner v. New York in which the Court decided that minimum wage laws were supported on the basis of liberty of contract (p. 270). Hatch's point: "The methodology is the same; the difference is only in the results, which hinge on the personal subjective values of the judge deciding the case" (pp. 270-271).

Moseley-Braun interrupted the proceedings, calling for a point of personal privilege. Her interruption follows:

This line of questioning I find to be personally offensive, and I am very sorry to break the train of thought and the demeanor of this committee. But I find it very difficult to sit here as the only descendent of a slave in this committee, in this body, and hear a defense, even an intellectual argument, that would suggest that there is a rationale, an intellectual rationale, a legal rationale, for slavery that can be discussed in this chamber at this time. (p. 272)

The Committee's senior Republican member was baffled.

Hatch insisted his intention was not to liken the results of the decision, only the method. Moseley-Braun's grievance, however, was not with the method, rather the "approach" used by Hatch:

And so I want just to give you my own sensitivity on this issue . . . if there are questions going to the current state of the law that are not as offensive that would elicit the same kind of responses, or if there is some other way that you can probe the judge's opinions on this area, I would very much, on a personal level, appreciate that you take another approach [italics added]. (p. 273)

The Washington Post wrote that the "genial tone of the hearings was broken" (1993, July 23). The New York Times wrote that "members of the committee seemed baffled at the objections of Senator Moseley-Braun" (1993, July 23). Referring to the "less inspired performance" in an editorial, they wrote that "Moseley-Braun's emotions overwhelmed good sense, with embarrassing results" (New York Times, 1993, July 24).

A mere misunderstanding is not an adequate explanation as Moseley-Braun's desire to stifle Hatch's words went beyond the correction. Moseley-Braun is the witness to a conversation in which Hatch attempted to set up Ginsburg by gaining affirmative admissions that a certain methodology is wrong while leading her to the eventual comparison with the Roe v. Wade case. Moseley-Braun interrupted this dialectic charging that Hatch had offended her - a moment of disturbance in which some turn of the conversation became too difficult to tolerate. The exchange had different meanings for Hatch and Moseley-Braun. Farrell writes of "severe dislocation in levels of meaning" which force one to "beat a hasty stylistic retreat, to withdraw as gracefully as circumstances allow" (p. 245). This conversation was, as argued, "broken" and Hatch withdrew quickly.

The rhetorical content emerging from this moment is where the conversation takes on rhetorical features - a juncture of tension where inventional occasions are offered (p. 241). To examine this as an inventional occasion requires speculation beyond the interplay of mere words. I am referring to the contending stories or images caused by the words, at the time they are uttered. Barnett Pearce discusses "resources," which include "all those stories, concepts, perceptions, memories, and so forth, by which persons make their world coherent" (p. 39). Moseley-Braun was drawing from her resources in an instantaneous moment in which she made a quick connection between the two cases which seemed, without elaboration, to contain certain dissimilarities. Pearce argues that these resources will appear in the expressions, in this case the interruption, as they constitute a "'logic' of meaning and action that defines what is obligatory, legitimate, dubious, or prohibited" (p. 39). The logic of Moseley-Braun's meaning was entirely different than Hatch's, or for that matter anyone else's in the room. This was why Moseley-Braun never gave up on her original interpretation which called for a logic of action, a certain behavior, to cease. Pearce argues this logic exerts a force that induces an interpretation of events in a certain way, noticing certain environmental aspects and responding to events in a certain way (p. 39). For Moseley-Braun, the response was necessary, a matter of responsibility.

The specific cause of the interruption can be located within the rhetoric. Consider Moseley-Braun's last statement on the issue:

... let me just say that as part of the debate, as part of the intellectual argument that you were engaging in with the judge, you come back - you, in fact, did come back and say to her, well there are some who would defend the right of contract in this situation. And I am just saying to you that even listening to this debate is very difficult to me, and on a point of personal privilege. . . . If there is another way that you can approach the criticism of judicial activism, I would appreciate your taking it (Hearing, pp. 273-274).

Here described was the disjoining of levels of meaning which caused the initial interruption. However, it seems that on two levels of meaning Moseley-Braun continued her charge. First, she maintained that Hatch was rationalizing the Dred Scott case as a possible right of contract; second, there was the "take another approach" argument.

Regarding the first, it is necessary to return to the cause of her disturbance. "Disturbance," is one of three junctures of tension, or "topoi for rhetoric" which cause a "transformation . . . when and why conversation begins to take on rhetorical features" (Farrell, p. 241). There is a certain point during the exchange between Hatch and Judge Ginsburg which caught the attention of Moseley-Braun. Moseley-Braun was correct in what she heard. Hatch stated only a few minutes prior, "But, you know, some people would argue that the constitutional right to contract...