Nicky Woolf in New Statesman:
The 116th Congress, the members of which were officially sworn in on Thursday, contains a lot of firsts. The first two Native American women to serve as representatives. The first two Muslim women to serve as representatives. The first openly gay congresswoman from Kansas. The first Latina representatives from Texas. While these are important benchmarks in their own right, there is also a notable difference in the tone of Congress. This historically young, historically diverse, and historically – though still not proportionally – female Congressional intake has already begun airing out the stuffy tone of America’s august legislative body. One of those leading that charge is Rashida Tlaib, the new representative from Michigan’s 13th district and one of the two first Muslim women to serve in the House of Representatives – and she is wasting no time in making her voice heard. “We’re gonna go in there,” she said, speaking to the progressive organising group MoveOn just hours after she was sworn in, “and we’re going to impeach the motherfucker.”
This caused the predictable backlash of pearl-clutching from Republican circles, whose faux-outrage at the swear-word would, perhaps, have had more moral weight if they had not spent the previous three years justifying their support for a president who boasted of “grabbing” women “by the pussy,” and attacking Democrats for their “political correctness”. Tlaib has shown admirable form and consistency in this area. “Courteous behavior can’t be reserved for someone who labels hard-working Mexican immigrants who have come to pursue the American Dream as ‘rapists’,” she wrote in an op-ed in 2016 for the Detroit Free Press, after having been ejected from a Trump event for demanding he read the constitution.
More here.