The Senate Judiciary Committee voted unanimously Wednesday to approve Janet Reno as the first woman to be attorney general.
Before the 18-0 vote, lawmakers from both parties were effusive in their praise for Reno, the 54-year old Dade Country prosecutor who was nominated after President Clinton's first two attempts to fill the job collapsed under a furor over his candidates' hiring of illegal immigrants as household workers.
"I think this is a very significant day," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D- Calif., a freshman member of the panel. "Janet Reno is a women well steeped in law enforcement and criminal justice who also has a deep sense of independence and independent thought. I think it's a wonderful marriage, it is in fact history in the making."
Reno glided through the hearings deflecting more questions than she answered and leaving the direction of her stewardship of the Justice Department far from clear.
But she impressed many of the senators, drawing frequently in her answers on 15 years of experience as an elected prosecutor, seasoned by the harsh realities of law enforcement in the volatile, ethnically polarized South Florida county that encompasses Miami.
Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., D-Del., chairman of the committee, and Sen. Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, the ranking Republican, speeded up the approval process for Reno, obtaining consent of the panel's members to waive the usual seven-day waiting period before the committee votes on nominees.
Democrats on the committee completed their work on Reno's nomination expressing relief that they escaped the unpleasantness of the hearings on Zoe Baird, the corporate lawyer who was Clinton's first choice for the job until she withdrew her nomination under fire. His second choice, Judge Kimba M. Wood, dropped out before she was nominated.