GOP Candidate for Ward 2 Council Seat Drops Out
By • September 10, 2020 0 1823
Katherine Venice, a Republican and self-identified “reformer of capitalism” who is virulently anti-Trump, formally removed her name on Sept. 10 from the ballot of the Nov. 3 general election, alerting the DC Board of Elections. Venice was the sole Republican candidate for the Ward 2 seat on the District Council.
Now-Council member Brooke Pinto won the Democratic nomination for the four-year term starting Jan. 20, 2021, at the June 3 primary election. Pinto also won the June 16 special election to fill the seat for the rest of the term left vacant when Council member Jack Evans resigned in mid-January. Pinto won in a field of eight Democratic candidates. As the only Republican, Venice won her primary by default.
By way of explanation, Venice sent an open letter to Ward 2 to The Georgetowner for possible publication on Sept. 8. In the letter, she writes: “To lead by example in what is the most critical, once-in-a-lifetime fight for all of us, I have today filed to formally withdraw from the Ward 2 Council race, in order to continue focusing entirely on fulfilling this obligation as I have done every single day since May, and to (peacefully) fight my heart out for democracy, our Constitution, our community and our shared humanity. I will have the opportunity to run for Council in the future, but there will not be another opportunity to fight to save our democracy from Trump’s authoritarian takeover.”
Venice states her strong feeling that U.S. democracy is on life-support, due not only to corporate corruption and an increasingly authoritarian presidency, but to “extreme individualism” as per Professors John Kay CBE and Sir Paul Collier CBE. [hyperlink]
“Only when we stop complacently believing in the fairy-tale that simply voting for Joe and Kamala in November (which you all must do) is all that is required of us — that it is someone else’s job to do the real (i.e. hard, grueling and gritty) work of saving our democracy whilst we just free-ride off their efforts — will we stop this American Nightmare,” she writes. “Our only chance to stop this authoritarian takeover is to stop pointing the finger at Trump, and instead look into ourselves, recognize the Trump in all of us, to see how we are behaving with Trumpian traits (hopefully albeit of a much lesser intensity!) — and immediately correct course.”
Venice concludes: “I leave you with a question, one which can only be answered with actions: do you deserve democracy? Prove it! Because if you — we all — are not actively (and peacefully) fighting now and every day to save democracy, then no, we don’t deserve it.”
