Congresswoman-elect Cori Bush may have just been elected to the House and appointed to the House Committee on the Judiciary, but don’t be fooled: she’s not taking her activist hat off any time soon.
The committee appointment was announced Friday evening by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and has been a long-time goal of Bush’s. She said it’s something she’s aspired to since she first ran for office in 2016.
“I always said that the Judiciary Committee was where I wanted to be because I wanted to be able to address policing and so many other things that have affected St. Louis for such a long time,” she said in an interview with The American. “So when I ran this time, of course, that was front of mind.”
Bush says people told her not to expect to be appointed to the committee, given that the majority of its members are attorneys. And so while she’ll be a part of the racial minority of the committee as she becomes its 41st member, she’ll also hold another minority status as one of the few members who is not a lawyer.
She said she believes her House colleagues believe her voice should be represented in this committee, regardless of her more liberal views, because she’s had such a different lived experience.
“Out of all the Congress members, I’m the one that is from the Ferguson movement and have continued to do that work, the work to save lives, a work to help build,” she said.
The House Committee on the Judiciary is charged with protecting Constitutional freedoms and civil liberties, oversight of the U.S. Departments of Justice and Homeland Security, legal and regulatory reform, innovation, competition and anti-trust laws, terrorism and crime and immigration reform.
According to the committee’s website, they send the largest number of substantive bills to the House floor each year, which is something that makes Bush feel optimistic. She said she and her team have three primary areas of focus: the criminal legal system and policing; voting rights; and gun violence, from the standpoint of this being a problem born out of systemic oppression.
“In my eyes, it’s a huge win for our district where the Ferguson uprising happened,” she said. “To be in this position, to be able to work on policing, to work on the criminal legal system, to work on these issues that are still happening in a place where, for six years running strong, we’re still number one for police murder, from 2013 to 2019, to be able to work on that is just a huge deal, it’s a huge win.”