Tennessee Rep. Marsha Blackburn, a woman who both supports Donald Trump and believes she has the solutions to fix a Senate so dysfunctional that it’s “enough to drive you nuts,” has announced her bid to take retiring Republican Sen. Bob Corker’s seat.
Blackburn, you may recall, led the sham investigation into Planned Parenthood and fetal tissue donation, an anti-abortion campaign based on doctored and highly deceptive videos that sought to discredit the women’s health organization. It was called the House Select Investigative Panel on Infant Lives, and it cost $1.59 million dollars; as the committee head, Blackburn compared the legal and medically necessary practice of fetal tissue donation to the Nuremberg Code and alleged that it was akin to selling “baby body parts.” Her rhetoric threatened the lives of medical researchers and their work.
Under Blackburn, the committee subpoenaed 17 medical companies for private information of staff—including researchers, lab technicians, and graduate students—who worked on projects involving fetal tissue donation. “We are going to review the business practices of these procurement organizations and do some investigating of how they have constructed a for-profit business model from selling baby body parts,” she said at the time.
In announcing her bid for Senate, Blackburn said she believes the problem with the Senate is that “too many Senate Republicans act like Democrats or worse,” criticizing Republicans for failing to repeal and replace Obamacare. Her other bad opinions include opposing net neutrality, denying climate change, and, in the wake of the NFL’s protests against Donald Trump’s racist comments, filing a resolution to remind Americans the appropriate ettiquette during the National Anthem.