WASHINGTON — U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett’s pastor was watching earlier this year when the Dallas Democrat had a viral committee hearing exchange with Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga.
Greene had jabbed Crockett by suggesting her “fake eyelashes” were interfering with her ability to read on the dais.
Crockett’s response poking at Green’s appearance — “bleach-blond, bad-built butch body” — startled Rev. Dr. Frederick Haynes III, senior pastor at Friendship-West Baptist Church in Dallas.
“I was drinking water and it all came out,” Haynes said during a panel discussion set up by Crockett at the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation’s annual legislative conference in Washington.
“I called her immediately. I said, ‘You gotta warn me when you’re going to do stuff like that,’” Haynes told a capacity crowd of several hundred people at the session, titled “Clapback: Fighting in the current politically violent climate.”
The panel also featured Harris County Attorney Christian Menefee and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who is prosecuting an election interference case against former President Donald Trump and others related to the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.
Friday’s panel explored the political significance of Crockett’s showdown with Greene and included pleas for Trump opponents to organize ahead of the Nov. 5 election.
Polling shows a close presidential contest as Republicans, motivated to retake the White House, have hammered Vice President Kamala Harris over inflation and the Biden administration’s immigration policies.
A former Texas state representative, Crockett’s star has been rising steadily since she joined Congress last year.
She was recently named a national co-chair of Harris’ presidential campaign and has been traveling the country on her behalf.
She scored a prime spot at last month’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
Crockett got a major profile boost in May from her exchange with Greene as her alliterative phrase spread quickly online. Crockett began raising campaign funds by selling branded merchandise bearing the words as part of a “clapback collection” and her campaign applied for a trademark.
Greene has largely avoided talking publicly about the exchange with Crockett, although she posted a video on X in May lifting weights.
“Yes my body is built and strong NOT with nips, tucks, plastic, or silicone, but through a healthy lifestyle,” Greene said.
Haynes urged the audience to “organize our clapback” and said his church has been holding a series of conversations focused on the election and countering misinformation.
“You join our church, you get a membership card in one hand, voter registration card in the other hand,” he said.
He recalled the celebrations that followed Barack Obama’s 2009 inauguration. While Obama supporters were partying, Haynes said, conservatives were busy organizing the Tea Party movement that targeted state and local races and helped lay the foundation for Trump’s 2016 victory.
Menefee and other panelists discussed what they cast as Texas Republicans’ efforts at voter suppression, highlighting the case of Crystal Mason, a Tarrant County woman who was convicted of trying to vote while on federal supervised release and sentenced to five years in prison.
Voting rights advocates said the severity of Mason’s sentence spotlighted inequities in Texas’ voting laws. Mason, in the audience, was called up to the stage to tell her story.
The audience applauded when she mentioned a court ruling overturning her 2018 conviction. Then she shared that Tarrant County District Attorney Phil Sorrells has appealed that ruling.
“I’m still in this fight, and I’m out here educating people, telling them how important it is to vote,” Mason said.
Sorrells’ office has said voting is the cornerstone of democracy and his office will “protect the ballot box from fraudsters who think our laws don’t apply to them.”
Republicans say prosecuting such cases is necessary to preserve the integrity of elections.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton expressed his commitment to “protecting the security of the ballot box and the integrity of every legal vote” last month, when agency investigators executed search warrants in Frio, Atascosa and Bexar counties related to allegations of election fraud and vote harvesting in 2022.
Critics say the Republican focus on “election integrity” is really an effort to undermine the voting power of communities of color. During Friday’s panel, Crockett emphasized the importance of voting in races beyond the presidential contest.
“You can’t sit there and skip the DA race, because that’s how we end up with the Crystal Masons,” she said. “That’s how we end up with our brothers, our sisters, our cousins, all being incarcerated for little or nothing and getting the highest amount of time.”
