The Social Pathology of Virginia Foxx

Question of the Day: If Virginia Foxx were confronted by a starving beggar blocking her access to, say, Walgreen’s, would she:

a. Kick him in the leg and demand that he move, pronto?

b. Call the Capitol Police and ask them to remove him, pronto?

c. Step over him, hitting him in the head with her big handbag as she went?

d. Cancel her visit to Walgreen’s and go sit in her car until someone else dealt with the beggar?

She habitually talks in public about how poor she was growing up, but her contempt for the poor suggests a cold lack of empathy. She’s rich, she’s bullying, she’s rude to people who get in her way, she seems completely devoid of compassion, fellow-feeling, human understanding, or sympathy.

When two Capitol interns blundered onto a “Members Only” elevator with Foxx, she was incensed: “The things we have to put up with around here!” she commented, as though her royal presence had been violated.

She votes her lack of empathy on the floor of the U.S. House and often opens her mouth to display a shocking lack of humanity. Her comment about Matthew Shepherd in front of the boy’s grieving mother is perhaps the most famous example of this, but it’s far from the only example.

Refusing to hold predatory credit card companies accountable for raising interest rates and adding new fees, Foxx said, “People who take out credit cards don’t have a gun to their head. If you don’t like the rate, get another credit card.” She instinctively channels Marie Antoinette with no sense of irony: "I don't see raising the minimum wage as helping American workers,” she told Roll Call in 2009.

Her bland failure of empathy hit almost operatic heights when she argued against predatory mortgage relief on the floor of the House in February 2010: “Most of these people who got these loans that are in trouble now got them because they never expected to pay them back. They expected somebody to bail them out. They weren’t honest when they did the loans, and now they are going to be bailed out by this legislation. Now it’s just unbelievable that that’s the attitude that people have. They could be getting help out of the [unintelligible] program that already exists, but they don’t do it because they don’t want to pay the money back and they don’t want to share the increase in value if they ever sell the home for the federal government which is underwriting their mortgage. I think again they’re living in a never-never land. They think that they’re due this money for free. They’ve been taught to live in a welfare society. We’re continuing the welfare mentality.”

That she doesn’t understand, and doesn’t care, about the thousands of honest, forward-looking, optimistic Americans who found themselves underwater on their mortgages, and who were led into those loans by hustling sharks – that she can brush them all aside as welfare kings and queens -- opens a window into her own impoverished soul.

She was famously one of a handful of Republicans who voted against any aid for the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Most recently, she actually voted to repeal a statute intended to provide health coverage to some 30 million Americans who would otherwise be uninsured.

She’s got a huge grudge she’s been carrying around all her life. No one ever helped her, goddamnit, and she’ll be goddamned and go to hell before she ever lifts a hand to help anyone else.