Sheila Jackson Lee (D, Affirm Action) Rejects “Special Privileges”!

In its report on Democratic objections to Rep. Allen West’s (R, Fla.) email description of Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Shultz’s (D, Fla.) as “vile,” “despicable,” and “not a lady” in response to her attack on him, Politico missed the real news.

The real news was not the sputtering of Democrats like Rep. Jackie Speier (D, Cal), who called West a misogynistic sexual harasser, or Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D, NY), who noted the significance of West’s comment coming “on the anniversary of the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, N.Y., 73 years ago.” (Actually, maybe Maloney’s comment was newsworthy, since the Seneca Falls Convention, July 19-20, 1848, was actually 163 years ago.) The real news buried in the Politico piece was the statement by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D, Tex):

I’m disappointed and I believe that ladies should never be called unladylike for participating as a woman in a man’s world,” Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) told POLITICO. “That’s what many of us do in this body. We don’t ask for special privileges, we simply ask that if there is a disagreement with our words you can come to the floor and discourse and debate.”

Sheila Jackson Lee has never encountered any “special privilege” — for women, blacks, Hispanics, gays, immigrants legal or illegal — that she’s opposed. Any number of examples could be cited, but typical was her vote against an amendment to an education bill that “would prohibit any post-secondary institution that participates in any program under the Higher Education Act from discriminating or granting any preferential treatment in admission based on race, sex, ethnicity, color or national origin.”

I have seen no evidence that Lee objected to the special treatment that she no doubt received as a black woman when she was accepted to Yale in 1968 or to the University of Virginia Law School in 1972. In fact, if you consider the absurdity of her argument on the House floor earlier this year that repealing Obamacare would be unconstitutional (via The American Spectator) —

“The Fifth Amendment speaks specifically to denying someone their life and liberty without due process,” she said in a speech on the House floor…. “That is what H.R. 2 does and I rise in opposition to it. And I rise in opposition because it is important that we preserve lives and we recognize that 40 million-plus are uninsured.

She continued, “Can you tell me what’s more unconstitutional than taking away from the people of America their Fifth Amendment rights, their Fourteenth Amendment rights, and the right to equal protection under the law?”

— it’s difficult to avoid the suspicion that Ms. Lee must have also been given some special treatment in order to graduate from the UVa law school.

Sheila Jackson Lee rejecting “special privileges”? That’s about as credible, and hence as newsworthy, as Barack Obama claiming to object to massive government spending.