OPINION:
Rashida Tlaib is poised to become the first Muslim woman elected to Congress.
She’s also massively anti-President Donald Trump, and that — combined with her gender, her religious beliefs and her progressive leanings — makes her the new darling of the Democratic Party, the new speed dial on mainstream media’s approved list of political pundits.
On Tuesday, Tlaib won the Democratic nomination for the House seat held by John Conyers, the one he had to vacate due to multiple allegations of sexual harassment.
Republicans didn’t put up a candidate. So absent any unforeseen events, the unopposed Tlaib will win this November.
What a tool for Democrats she will be.
Tlaib is a trained social justice attorney with a past stint at the Sugar Law Center for Economic and Social Justice — which makes her on par in constitutional views with Barack Obama, Eric Holder, Kamala Harris and the rest of the victim card droppers of the left.
She’s politically savvy, having served in the state legislature for six years.
But it’s her hatred of Trump that matters most to the left.
Two years ago, Tlaib was physically removed from an event at which Trump was speaking. Why? She heckled him, interrupting his rally on the economy with this: “He doesn’t love Detroit. He doesn’t love no one who isn’t Donald Trump,” as the Detroit Free Press reported.
She then wrote in an op-ed for that same newspaper that that “it is unbecoming of any American to not stand up to Trump’s hate-filled rhetoric and tactics.”
Around that same time frame, she was dubbed a “new Obama” by New York Magazine, for her penchant for using political activism to obtain personal policy goals.
In March, she told Middle East Eye that her campaign and legislative designs were all about the impeachment — that “this is about electing the jury that’s going to impeach him, and I make a heck of a juror.”
And in June, she was among those protesting the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the White House’s travel ban, telling those who would listen that one of her first legislative matters of business would be to repeal it.
It’s Resistance, as Nancy Pelosi envisioned it.
But what’s different about Tlaib that no doubt has Democrats so nail-bitingly eager to see her political star shine bright is that not only is she a woman, and so can throw the gender card; not only is she a liberally trained attorney, and so can twist the Constitution to her progressive will; not only is she a former state legislator, and so has experience and contacts to help her climb the far-left political ladder — but she’s a Muslim.
She has the credentials to serve as a spokesperson for the Muslim world.
She has the street cred, in the eyes of the media and left, to carry forth the torch that will burn Trump for religious discrimination — as a misogynistic, bigoted hater of all-things-Muslim.
As Democrats go, yes, indeed, Tlaib’s a definite gold mine.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley.
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