California Democratic State Senator Carole Migden was on the state House floor lobbying for her Senate Bill 484 this past Wednesday. It's a measure to require cosmetics manufacturers to disclose the presence of carcinogens in their products. Here's what happened, according to the Sacramento Bee's local section front page story "'Ghost vote' spooks the Assembly," dated Sept. 2 (online version here, free reg. req.):

Nobody was surprised that...Migden voted in favor of her own...bill. The problem was she did it in the wrong legislative house...Migden, a San Francisco Democrat, pushed the voting button of a GOP assemblyman who was temporarily away from his desk. Her action violated Assembly rules and drew an angry response from Repulicans...Migden, chairwoman of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, declined to comment Thursday...'There's no story there,' she said.

The bill later passed, in another vote taken without her engaged assistance, and awaits the Governor's approval. She later apologized, according to The Bee. Her arrogance is stunning, even for a San Francisco Democrat. If a private citizen is found to have fraudulently impersonated another individual while voting, he or she is subject to criminal prosecution. In the California legislature, a lawmaker gets off Scott-free.

Her colleagues should mount an effort to officially censure Migden for her reprehensible act of political fraud and hooliganism. The entitlement mentality of urban Democrats has never been more nakedly evident. The San Francisco Chronicle, scrupulously balanced on its op-ed pages, but far less so in its Left-leaning regular news coverage, has yet to pick up on the Migden debacle. The same day The Bee reported on Migden's shady "ghost vote," The Chron had her crowing over the partisan Borking of an insufficiently Green gubernatorial air pollution control official. The Chron did report on her cosmetics bill clearing the House (end of this item) but made no mention of her impersonating a Republican legislator.

The Chron's avoidance of Migden's appalling lapse wouldn't be because she's an "out" lesbian who continues to champion gay marriage legislation that would override a state initiative which defined marriage as between a man and woman, and calling attention to her broken ethical compass would infuriate the paper's large gay and lesbian readership, would it?

Nah.

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Posted by Matt Rosenberg at September 3, 2005 09:26 AM