While I’m waiting for my mail-in ballot to arrive, I decided to look over the candidates and issues that the primary election is all about.

As it happens, and it’s not a big surprise, most candidates are running unopposed, and the ballot questions are easy “Yes” answers, so there’s not a lot of research to do.

Except for the 3rd Congressional District, that is.

This used to be the First Congressional District, but in 2018 the PA Supreme Court redrew the map after declaring the old one unconstitutional and renamed this one the Third for, I’m sure, some good reason of their own.

Even when I lived in the Wissahickon neighborhood, I was in the same district, the First Congressional District, as it was called then. Back in, I think it was 2010, or thereabouts, I had some very pleasant neighbors, Rick and Lisa, and Rick ran on the Republican ticket against the Democratic incumbent Chaka Fattah.

This district has the distinction of being the most Democratic partisan district in the entire country.

We’re number one! Yay!

So Rick, of course, didn’t stand a chance. Still he gamely ran his campaign and did better than expected, pulling something like 10% of the vote, if I recall correctly.

A few years later, after I had moved away from the neighborhood, but not out of the congressional district, Chaka Fattah and his cronies were indicted for misappropriating hundreds of thousands of dollars of federal, charitable, and campaign funds and accepting a bribe for an ambassadorship.

I sent Rick and Lisa an email asking if Rick was feeling a bit of schadenfreude.

That’s the trouble with having a district that’s so heavily weighted towards one party. It’s asking for corruption.

Fattah was eventually convicted of all charges, but then the corrupt Roberts Supreme Court decided it wanted to let a former Republican governor (Robert F. McDonnell) off the hook for bribery, so it redefined the meaning of bribery. This had the effect of also letting some Democrats like Fattah off the hook, which I’m sure that Chief Justice Roberts and his cronies never intended. 

But Fattah was still sentenced to ten years in the hoosegow on the other charges, of which he only served about six, I think.

(By the way, Chaka Fattah, Jr. was also arrested and found guilty of a bunch of fraud and tax charges. Like father like son.)

Oh, I started to write about this election’s future convicts candidates before I got distracted. Maybe next time.