When House Democrats refused to alter the rules last week so
Rep. Tammy Duckworth could vote by proxy they said it was because it could begin a slippery slope of other requests.
But
"Daily Show" host Jon Stewart said Tuesday he believes something else is to blame.
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, he said, has received an award from National Partnership for Women and Families "for her leadership in fighting for working women," and once filed a friend-of-the-court brief for a woman whose employer wouldn't work with her to keep her on the job during her pregnancy.
But when Duckworth was told by her doctor that she shouldn't leave Illinois, her home state, to vote for party leadership, Pelosi did little to help in her quest to vote from that state, Stewart said.
"You are suppressing the vote of a minority pregnant woman who is a wounded war veteran. She is everything you supposedly stand for stuffed into one individual. She is a Democratic demographic turduckworth," Stewart said.
The answer, he said, might lie in the fact that Duckworth supports New Jersey Rep. Frank Pallone for the top Democratic spot on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Pelosi favors California Rep. Anna Eshoo.
"And that's how the precedent was set that a woman leader could be every bit as politically craven as her male counterparts," Stewart said.
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