Rising Democratic lawmaker dies at 58
Tubbs Jones led ethics committee
WASHINGTON – Stephanie Tubbs Jones, a Cleveland Democrat who was in her fifth term in the U.S. House of Representatives and was chairwoman of the House ethics committee, died Wednesday at Huron Hospital in East Cleveland, Ohio. She was 58 and had a brain hemorrhage.
She was taken to the hospital Tuesday night after being found unconscious at the wheel of her car in a Cleveland suburb. She was taken off life support Wednesday afternoon.
Tubbs Jones was the first African-American woman elected to Congress from Ohio and was a rising force in national Democratic politics. She spoke at the Democratic National Convention in 2000, chaired the platform committee at the party’s 2004 convention and was a co-chairman of Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry’s presidential campaign four years ago.
In January 2005, she lodged a formal objection to the certification of the 2004 presidential election in Ohio, alleging that electoral irregularities allowed President Bush to win the state by 119,000 votes. After a two-hour debate in the House, the original results were upheld.
Last year, Tubbs Jones became an early supporter of the presidential bid of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y.
Tubbs Jones, who was also a member of the House Ways and Means Committee, was considered one of the more reliably liberal voices in Congress. She had a lifetime voting rating of 98 out of 100 on the American Civil Liberties Union’s Congressional Scorecard. In 2003, she was one of 11 House members to oppose a resolution supporting the U.S. invasion of Iraq.
She was co-sponsor of the Child Abuse Protection and Enforcement Act, which was signed into law in 2000 by President Bill Clinton and gave the criminal justice system greater powers to track and prosecute child abusers.
In 2006, Tubbs Jones was on a House panel that investigated allegations of sexual misconduct by Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., in a scandal involving congressional pages. Later that year, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., named Tubbs Jones chairwoman of the House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct, popularly known as the ethics committee.