According to reports, Lissa Lucas is running a campaign for the House in West Virginia. A Democrat, Lucas is running a grassroots campaign that is focused on, amongst many important issues, the hold that the fossil fuel industry has on the state legislature.
So in the second week of February, when the legislature held public hearings on House Bill 4268 — which would allow for the drilling on properties with multiple owners if 75 percent, rather than all, of the owners enter into a lease — Lucas came to voice her opposition to the legislation, believing it to undermine the rights of property owners. [...]
She stood on the floor and read off corporate donors to the legislators moving the legislation — going through the gamut of fossil fuel companies dominant in West Virginia, from Dominion to FirstEnergy.
Republican John Shott got bent out of shape and told Lucas that there were not supposed to be “personal comments made” about the legislators. This is a strange thing considering that none of these things are “personal,” they’re public information about the donor list of representatives. As she told the Intercept, the idea that she was making a personal attack is absurd and telling.
“They said, No personal attacks. Which is a sensible rule to me — you don’t want someone going up there and calling people names,” she told The Intercept. “Delegate Shott construed this public campaign finance information from the representatives’ own campaign finance reporting as personal attacks. And if they feel attacked by mentioning their donors, to me, they just shouldn’t be taking that money.” [...]
“I think Delegate Shott made a bad call because if I had just read those donor — again it’s not like new information, it’s all out there,” she said. “It’s not something secret that I came up with. If I had just read that off possibly in the Charleston Gazette, they would have said several speakers spoke and one spoke about campaign finances. … He brought so much more attention to it by having me thrown out than he could have if he had read off the list of donors himself.”
Lucas wrote about her experience on her own website. She also listed out all of the fossil fuel money that she was stopped from speaking at the public hearing.
For those watching online or in the gallery, if your delegate votes to give away your rights to their corporate donors, you should get behind a candidate who’ll work for YOU, rather than someone who is getting paid to hand over your property rights to corporations. Save for Del Harshbarger, there are Republicans challenging them in the primary, and a Democrat who will challenge the winner, so in most cases there’s someone no matter your political persuasion.
Full disclosure: There is a Democratic challenger for Harshbarger—that would be me. But I’m here to talk about the sale of our constitutional rights, not to campaign. So let’s move on to Delegate Armstead.
Watch below. And for more discussion head over to community member durrati’s diary here.