THE WORST PERSON IN THE WORLD
(apologies to Keith Olbermann)
Kelly Ayotte (R-NH)
Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.) has turned down a dinner invitation during the congressional recess from a woman whose husband was killed by gun violence. Anne Lyczak lost her husband Richard in January 1994, when he was killed in a drive-by shooting in Portsmouth, N.H. Last week, Lyczak wrote a letter to Ayotte, inviting her to dinner at her house to talk about ways to prevent gun violence…. Lyczak proposed dinner with Ayotte on May 1, although she said she would happily work around the senator’s schedule.
To say that Kelly Ayotte has had a very, very bad couple of weeks would be an understatement. It wasn’t bad enough that she voted against a universal background check bill favored by 91% of Americans and then tried to defend herself at a town hall meeting in New Hampshire. First she said that she was trying to spare gun shop owners from the burdens of conducting additional background checks. Then she trotted out the piece de resistance, the frequently and easily debunked argument that expanded background checks would lead to a national registry of gun owners. (It didn’t work for Ted Cruz, either.)
Things didn’t get any better when a constituent invited Ayotte to her home for dinner and a discussion of “ways to reduce…instances of gun violence.”. Unfortunately, Ayotte declined the invitation, stating that she was too busy making up silly reasons to avoid discussing gun control being a Senator to find time in her schedule. Yes, Ayotte is undoubtedly busy, but when she declined the invitation, many took it as her avoiding discussing a difficult issue. She looked small, petty, and afraid to engage constituents that don’t agree with her.
The town hall had to have been excruciating for Ayotte, tasked as she was with explaining with why she sided with the NRA over her constituents and nine out of 10 Americans. That was a challenge in and of itself. Then a constituent changed the subject, and asked why Ayotte voted against the Paycheck Fairness Act:
QUESTION: My grandmother, who was an extremely intelligent woman, trained many, many men who then became her boss, and so on and so forth. [She] never received a pension, never, um, was really paid what she was worth. And I was disappointed that you voted against the Equal Pay Act, but maybe there was something in the bill that you thought would be detrimental to the economy or whatever. But I was curious if you could explain your philosophy about equal pay and how, maybe, you could suggest something that we could all agree upon so that women would stop making 75 cents for every dollar a man makes….
And then Ayotte stepped in it with both feet:
AYOTTE: We have existing laws — Title VII, um, Lilly Ledbetter, all those existing protections in place — that, I believe, enforce and provide that people doing equal jobs are, certainly in this country, should receive equal pay. So, uh, that bill, in my view, didn’t add — in fact I think it created a lot of additional burdens that would have been hard, um, to make it more difficult for job creators to create jobs…. The reason that I voted against that specific bill is that, I looked at it, and there were already existing laws that need to be enforced and can be enforced and I didn’t feel like adding that layer was going to help us better get at the equal pay issue.
I’ll cut Ayotte a little bit of slack for an excess of political clumsiness and tone-deafness. That said, she she should be concerned, given that her approval rating has dropped precipitously since her vote against universal background checks. Her votes have demonstrated that she’s in the pocket of the NRA and owned by business interests. Her performance at the town hall demonstrates that she clearly doesn’t understand that she serves at the pleasure of the people of New Hampshire. And her declining the dinner invitation makes her appear that she lacks compassion and understanding.
Then again, Kelly Ayotte is everything that’s wrong with today’s GOP. The mystery is why Americans keep electing people as insensitive, corrupt, and dismissive as her.
