GOP Sends Black Congresswoman a "For Sale" Sign with Her Name On It
At Tuesday night's Democratic debate, billionaire presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg got a little too honest. Referring to the wave of newly elected congressional Democrats who flipped control of the House of Representatives in 2018, Bloomberg said, "Twenty-one of those were people that I spent $100 million to help elect. All of the new Democrats who came in, who put Nancy Pelosi in charge and gave the Congress the ability to control this presidency. I bought—I, I got them."
That one slip, "I bought," is probably not the message that Bloomberg wanted to convey. But it got a lot of people's attention, with both Justice Democrats, the progressive political action committee, and Donald Trump Jr. seizing on the comment.
One of those 21 Democrats whose campaign benefited from Bloomberg is Lucy McBath of Georgia's 6th district. McBath's 17-year-old son was murdered in 2012, after a white man started shooting at him and his friends because he thought their music was too loud. A group funded by Bloomberg, Everytown for Gun Safety Action Fund, spent $1.25 million to help elect McBath in 2018, according to the Washington Post, helping her flip a historically Republican seat. McBath endorsed Bloomberg in the Democratic presidential primary.
Since the election, conservative groups have had their sights on McBath. In an interview in May of last year, National Rifle Association president Carolyn Meadows said that her stance on gun control "didn’t have anything to do with [McBath's election]. It had to do with being a minority female." Meadows, who also led a group that opposed the construction of a Martin Luther King Jr. monument, later apologized.
And on Wednesday, Camille Gallo, the regional press secretary for the National Republican Congressional Committee, which works to elect Republicans to the House of Representatives, tweeted out that the NRCC was trolling McBath over Bloomberg's comments. To drive home that they believed her seat was bought and paid for, Gallo apparently sent McBath a "For Sale" sign with her name on it.
The optics of labeling a black woman from the south as "for sale" seems lost on Gallo, particularly on the day when the House passed the Emmett Till anti-lynching bill, but that's not surprising since the NRCC doesn't seem to have had much success working with black candidates. As the Pew Research Center reports, the 116th Congress is the most racially diverse in U.S. history, yet there are just two black Republicans—South Carolina's Tim Scott in the Senate and Texas's Will Hurd, who last year announced he didn't plan to seek reelection to the House.
McBath took the NRCC's trolling and turned it into a call for donations. On Twitter, she wrote, "These attacks began on day one. They harassed my elderly mother-in-law. The NRA said I only won bc I’m a 'minority woman.' Each time, I did what I learned all too well after the death of my son—fight back."
The Bureaucratic Method
There's no telling how many guns we have in America—and when one gets used in a crime, no way for the cops to connect it to its owner. The only place the police can turn for help is a Kafkaesque agency in West Virginia, where, thanks to the gun lobby, computers are illegal and detective work is absurdly antiquated. On purpose. Thing is, the geniuses who work there are quietly inventing ways to do the impossible.
Originally Appeared on GQ
