It can be easy to forget about the many serious problems facing the United States besides just that of the ridiculously volatile person currently occupying its highest leadership position. The president subjects us to an endless volley of incendiary tweets and public statements peddling racism, sexism, and the like — but that doesn’t mean that the other issues have gone away.
No matter how many Republicans want to claim otherwise, the global environment is suffering. President Trump showed his essential disregard for this fact in, among other things, moving to pull the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Accord last year, but the facts of the struggling environment remain.
One of the latest fronts of this struggle turned out to be the chambers of the House Judiciary Committee of the West Virginia state legislature last Friday. The committee was holding a hearing for comments on a pending bill that, if passed, would grant oil and gas companies the right to drill on private land with the consent of only 75 percent of the landowners instead of the presently required 100 percent.
West Virginia resident Lissa Lucas — who is also a Democratic candidate for the West Virginia state House — was among those who appeared at the hearing, there to voice her opposition to the measure. As a part of her brief remarks, she read off a list of oil and gas industry donors to the state lawmakers supporting the measure — well, she attempted to do so.
As reported by HuffPost, in the middle of her remarks, after the committee pressed her to keep quiet about the donations, her microphone was cut off, and following that, she ended up being physically removed from the premises.
This was all because the lawmakers didn’t want the list of their oil and gas industry donors to be read.
After initially reading off a few names and some of the donations they’d received, one of the committee members interrupted and asked her to refrain from making “personal comments.”
Lucas was persistent, and just a very short time after she began speaking again, the same committee member directed a couple of men to remove her. She responded by quipping “drag me off” and continuing to speak about the issue as she walked away with the men’s arms firmly around hers.
Check out the video below.
Lucas commented on the incident in a blog post, writing:
‘Refuse any donation that, if someone mentions it, makes you feel personally attacked. Because that’s not an attack. That’s guilt. And you SHOULD be feeling that. Let that guilt about who you’re really working for inform your votes; don’t let the corporate money do it.’
With midterm elections coming sooner than later, many feel that there’s an impending reshaping of national politics, with more individuals like Lucas elected to positions of power.
On the national level, Democrats need to pick up about two dozen seats in the House of Representatives and just two seats in the Senate to become the majority party in each respective chamber.
They’ve been helped along in their efforts by resignation announcements from a whole host of House Republicans.
In the Senate, they’ve been helped along by the victory late last year of Democrat Doug Jones in a special election to fill the Senate seat vacated by Jeff Sessions.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is continuing to undercut the global environment at every turn, through such means as having moved to overturn both the Waters of the United States rule and the Clean Power Plan.
Featured Image via Screenshot from the Video
