Ex-convict Corrine Brown of Jacksonville is running for Congress, giving life to Mark Twain’s comment: “here is no distinctly American criminal class – except Congress.”
Never one to be deterred by a small thing like being convicted of a felony, Brown has decided to try to get back in the U.S. House of Representatives, where she was from 1993 to 2017. Before that, she did a 10-year stretch in the Florida House.
She got into Congress via a racially gerrymandered district that snaked from Jacksonville to Orlando. After the courts declared it unconstitutional, she won in the redrawn district. After the district was reconfigured again, the courts ruled it unfair and it was then turned east to west, running in a thin strip from Jacksonville to Tallahassee.
Brown tried to run again in 2016, but after being indicted by a federal grand jury on 22 felony counts she was defeated by Al Lawson in the Democrat primary.
While in Congress she got high marks from liberal groups in their ratings. Her campaign slogan was “Corrine Delivers,” which referred to her ability to get pork-barrel projects for this area.
She went to prison because she was running a scam for scholarships for under-privileged students, which actually was a slush fund for her and her associates.
But after doing three years, she claimed to be old and sick and was released from prison before completing her sentence. Later, an appellate court overturned her conviction on the grounds that the trial judge had made a mistake. In May of this year she pled guilty to interference with the administration of Internal Revenue Service laws.
Apparently having recovered from her age and illness, she now follows in the grand tradition of other crooked Democrats, such as Alcee Hastings.
Hastings was a federal judge who was impeached – by a Democrat Congress — and thrown off the bench for perjury and bribery.
Like Brown, he decided to give the voters another chance and Democrats in Miami put him in Congress, where he stayed long enough to become the dean of the Florida delegation. He died last year after 30 years in the U.S. House. During that time, the impeached judge voted twice to impeach President Donald Trump.
Brown plans to run in District 10, which is in Central Florida and contains many of the
areas that were in her original House district. The incumbent, Val Demings, is running for the U.S. Senate.
The district is a safe haven for Democrats, although eight Republicans also are in the race.
Brown told a News4Jax reporter one reason she is running for office again was that too many innocent people are wrongly imprisoned.