If You Strike the Queen You Had Better Kill the Queen (in the Emersonian Sense, People)
[guest post by JVW]
Marcia Fudge failed to kill the Queen. For one brief nanosecond it appeared that Fudge, a five-term Democrat Congresswoman representing Cleveland, would pose a strong challenge to Nancy Pelosi’s ambitions of ascending back into the House Speaker’s seat. Yesterday media outlets reported that 16 renegade Democrats would refuse to vote for Pelosi as speaker, a number which could prevent her from receiving more votes than a unified Republican nominee in an open vote. Rep. Fudge had previously expressed a willingness to mount a campaign for the speakership, and the dictates of intersectionality suggested that if the Democrats were to dump an elderly white woman as party leader it would have to be for a minority woman (Rep. Fudge is black).
But earlier this evening, Rep. Fudge announced that she would not challenge Rep. Pelosi and instead threw her support behind San Fran Nan. What happened in the last 24 hours to change her mind? Perhaps it was the release of a three-year-old letter vouching for the character of a local Cleveland judge, Lance Mason, who at the time was being prosecuted for having savagely beaten his wife in front of their two small children. The Congresswoman characterized her friend as “a good man who made a very bad mistake,” and that his actions were “out of character and totally contrary to everything I know about him.” Mason would serve eight months in prison for his crime, and after he was released he would be hired by the Cleveland mayor to be the city’s minority business development director.
On Saturday, Frank Mason stabbed his estranged wife to death in her Shaker Heights, Ohio home.
– JVW