06 November 2014

America’s youngest lawmaker


Eliza Gray has a Time article about someone starting out early:
Saira Blair (photo) knocked off a Republican incumbent when she was just seventeen.
She says she will defer her spring semester classes to travel to the state’s capitol in Charleston, West Virginia and participate in the sixty-day legislative session from January of 2015 to March of 2015. She will be representing the 59th district of eighteen thousand people in West Virginia’s eastern panhandle, not far from Washington, D.C. She’ll make up her classes in the summer and fall.
Blair started to make news in May of 2014 when, at only seventeen, she defeated a sixty-seven-year-old Republican incumbent in the Republican primary. She turned eighteen in July of 2014, just in time to meet the age requirement to serve as a state delegate. She is the daughter of Craig Blair, a state senator. She donated almost four thousand dollars of her own money to the campaign. Blair is staunchly conservative, holding anti-abortion, pro-gun, and anti-gay marriage views, according to her campaign website. She is also a proponent of voter ID laws, and she wants to repeal a law in West Virginia that has led to unusually high gas taxes.
Planning to major in Spanish and economics, Blair says she wants to be a financial adviser when she graduates. She took a break after classes in geography and computer science to talk to Time about what it’s like to campaign in college and the best way to bring more jobs to West Virginia:
Why did you run this year instead of waiting until you were older?I’ve grown up with a politician father since I was six years old. I’ve always known it was something that I’d be interested in one day, I just never knew it would be at such a young age. After my junior year of high school, I decided to run because I attended a program called Youth and Government, where three hundred students go down to Charleston, they write a bill, they hear it in committee, and they bring it out on the House floor. After hearing some of the bills that students came up with, and seeing that they were fully capable of doing the job that people forty or fifty years older than them were doing, I realized that I didn’t have to wait.
Rico says he hopes that she doesn't get corrupted by the process too soon. (And may she never need a legal abortion...)

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