Better in their words…

The left is all over this one…

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There is the war on women that isn’t real, but that Democrats keep talking about. Then there is the Democratic war on one woman, which says a lot about how that party operates.

Ask Kristine Svinicki, a commissioner on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Ms. Svinicki is a respected nuclear engineer who was unanimously confirmed to the NRC in 2008, and whose term is up in June. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is now actively waging war to keep Ms. Svinicki from being renominated, as punishment for her role in exposing the behavior of Mr. Reid’s pet appointee to the NRC, Gregory Jaczko. For Ms. Svinicki’s efforts to protect female staffers, she has been attacked and slandered by Democrats.

After all, what is one woman, when measured against the left’s greater policy goals? The White House and its party remain opposed to nuclear energy. The key to strangling nuclear progress is the NRC, which sets industry rules. This is why, in 2004, Mr. Reid took hostage dozens of Bush nominees, vowing they would never be confirmed until his own, pre-programmed adviser, Mr. Jaczko, was installed at the commission.

The Bush White House rolled, and Mr. Jaczko was sent to the NRC with two missions: strangle industry progress and kill the Yucca Mountain waste repository planned for Mr. Reid’s home state of Nevada. Knowing an asset when he saw it, President Barack Obama elevated Mr. Jaczko to NRC chairman in 2009.

What Democrats did not foresee was the lengths Mr. Jaczko would go to carry out his orders. By the fall of last year, all four of the NRC’s Republican and Democratic commissioners had revolted. With unprecedented unity, they sent a letter to the White House relating their “grave concerns” that the “erratic” Mr. Jaczko was running the place like a despot. He’d ordered staff to withhold information from them, intimidated personnel into altering recommendations, and overridden the will of the majority.

If that weren’t enough, at a December House hearing the four commissioners went on to describe a man with a vicious management style. Ms. Svinicki told of Mr. Jaczko’s “continued outbursts of abusive rage, directed at subordinates.” Democratic Commissioner George Apostolakis described Mr. Jaczko’s “bullying and intimidating behavior toward NRC’s career staff.”

But it was William Magwood, Mr. Jaczko’s other fellow Democrat, who related the chairman’s penchant for going after women. He spoke of women staffers who had been “reduced to tears” by “the chairman’s extreme behavior” and of his “raging verbal assaults.” One woman, said Mr. Magwood, “couldn’t stop shaking after her experience” and had to talk to a supervisor until “she could calm down enough to drive home.” These were “tough, smart women who have succeeded in a male-dominated environment,” said Mr. Magwood, and to be humiliated in such a fashion was “painful.”

But not to Democrats—those valiant defenders of women. Worried her party might lose its NRC weapon, Sen. Barbara Boxer held her own December hearing to smear all four commissioners as incompetent and to leap to Mr. Jaczko’s defense. The Californian—who recently praised Georgetown student Sandra Fluke for “standing up to be heard” on contraception—lambasted the commissioners for speaking out. This “issue of the treatment of women” at the NRC, she said, reminded her of “Joe McCarthy” days, and was a “witch hunt.” How dare Ms. Sivincki engage in “outrageous character assassination” against a man whom the nation “was fortunate to have sitting” in the chairman’s seat?

Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, last heard railing about GOP men who “roll back” women’s rights, informed the commissioners that it was normal to occasionally “hurt people’s feelings” and that Mr. Jaczko was just “aggressively trying to do his job.” New Jersey’s Frank Lautenberg—who coined the term “maleogarchy” to describe Republicans—praised Mr. Jaczko: “One of the most intemperate people we had was General Patton. And guess what? He got it done.”

The White House’s response to these accusations of abuse and intimidation—delivered under oath by both Republican and Democratic commissioners, and backed up by staffers, former employees, and an inspector general report—was to do nothing. Mr. Jaczko, after all, has claimed he’s never “intentionally” bullied anyone. And so he remains in his job, while Ms. Svinicki is now teed up for retribution. Women’s groups like to call this “blaming the victim,” though that is apparently encouraged when the victim is a Republican.

Mr. Reid has been trashing the only female NRC commissioner, falsely accusing Ms. Svinicki of being soft on safety and having “lied” to Congress in past testimony. The White House, having looked initially to back Mr. Reid, has since sniffed political danger and late this week said it would send up her nomination papers.

That’s for the good, though this is hardly a happy story. Whatever the truth of the allegations against Mr. Jaczko, the fact that Democrats were unwilling to even investigate them speaks volumes. The next time Mr. Obama or Mr. Reid or Ms. Boxer dare to suggest a GOP “war on women,” remember Kristine Svinicki.

Write to kim@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared April 20, 2012, on page A11 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Democratic War on One Woman.

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