Joe Biden famously christened health-care reform as a “Big Fucking Deal,” but there is another BFD in his past, an inexplicable one, which may be health-care reform’s undoing when lawsuits go before the Supreme Court next year. An excerpt from Jeffrey Toobin’s excellent new New Yorker profile about Justice Clarence Thomas and his equally conservative wife, Virginia:

“Thomas was confirmed in the Senate by a vote of fifty-two to forty-eight, and neither the Judiciary Committee nor any other part of the government has since seen fit to reëxamine the Thomas-Hill controversy. Still, a good deal of evidence has since emerged about the protagonists and their testimony. Even near the end of the hearings, several other women who had worked for Thomas were prepared to testify and corroborate Hill’s testimony that Thomas had a history of making female subordinates uncomfortable with personal and sexual talk. The group included Angela Wright, Rose Jourdain, and Sukari Hardnett; other associates of Thomas, among them Kaye Savage and Fred Cooke, would have testified about the nominee’s long-standing interest in pornography, which would have corroborated Hill’s account. But Joseph Biden, the chairman of the Judiciary Committee at the time, decided not to call these witnesses. This year, Lillian McEwen, a Washington lawyer who had a long-term romantic relationship with Thomas before he met Ginni, published a memoir, D.C. Unmasked & Undressed. She, too, remarked on the Justice’s ‘strong interest in pornography,’ and she also said that Thomas scrutinized his work colleagues as prospective sexual partners. In short, virtually all the evidence that has emerged since the hearings corroborates Hill’s version of events.”

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Anita Hill, October 11, 1991: