The elected representative to the US Congress from my home district is Virginia Foxx, who won a hotly contested Republican primary last year by defeating Winston-Salem’s blogging city councilman Vernon Robinson.  Until now I’d say that’s been the most newsworthy part of her political career.

Well now she’s done gone and made a name for herself.  She’s one of just 11 US Representatives who voted against the $52 billion emergency-appropriation bill for Katrina victims.  In an article in the Winston-Salem Journal she’s quoted as saying:

"I want to know that
there are safeguards and that there won’t be abuses, and I have to do
what I think is the right thing to do," she said…

Foxx argued that it
would be better to allocate the money in stages. The government’s
approach to spending on Katrina sets a bad precedent for how it deals
with future disasters, she said.

In a sign that voting her conscience might have also been a shrewd political move for Foxx, all 12 of the comments that the story garnered on the paper’s website (as of 5:48 p.m., September 13, 2005) were in support of Foxx’s vote.

Me thinks Ms. Foxx might be getting a call for advice from some of her Republican counterparts in the near future.