Congressman Bobby Scott by Dan Duncan, licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0/Original

Another day, another bit of drama in the case of Virginia Lieutenant Governor Justin Fairfax. Fairfax has been accused by a colleague of committing forcible sodomy on her during the DNC convention in 2004. She brought the allegations to the Washington Post about the time Fairfax was elected lieutenant governor, which did a cursory inquiry, and dismissed the allegations as a he-said-she-said, informing her in March 2018 they weren’t pursuing the story and spiked it. Compare and contrast this with the way the Post pursued obviously bullsh** allegations against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.

Tuesday, the complainant, Dr. Vanessa Tyson, hired the law firm that had represented Christine Ford and, yesterday, released a very detailed statement about her experience with Fairfax. Fairfax responded with an X-rated tirade about Tyson and hired Brett Kavanaugh’s defense team as NOW demanded he resign.

This is all very interesting because Governor Ralph Northam was found to have submitted an image of himself either in blackface or in a KKK robe to his med school yearbook 35 years ago. That put Fairfax in the position of heir apparent and pressure mounted on Northam. Then, because the VA Democrats might be just as incompetent as the VA GOP, we found out that the next guy in line, Attorney General Mark Herring, had also done a blackface gig in college. So, suddenly, the top three elected officials in Virginia are all in danger of being forced to resign, leaving the last man standing as House Speaker Kirk Cox who won reelection by a literal coin toss.

Naturally, the big brain thinkers in the media leapt into action:

Here is a solution: Fairfax resigns and is replaced by Rep. Bobby Scott, a well-regarded African-American who is the senior member of the congressional delegation. Then, Northam resigns. Probably too Pat, but they need to do something like that. — Carl P. Leubsdorf (@CarlPLeubsdorf) February 6, 2019

Plausible? Possibly until today.

NEW: Aides to Virginia Democratic Rep. Bobby Scott told ABC News that the congressman learned about Dr. Vanessa Tyson's sexual allegations against Lt. Gov. Justin Fairfax in late December 2017 and early January 2018. https://t.co/BkV3973n94 — Axios (@axios) February 7, 2019

Perhaps in an effort to save his own ass after it was revealed that he sandbagged an allegation of a felony to benefit a fellow Virginia Democrat, and let’s just say it, okay, a fellow black male Virginia Democrat, Scott now appears to be throwing Fairfax under the bus.

Congressman @BobbyScott: "Allegations of sexual assault need to be taken seriously. I have known Professor Tyson for approximately a decade and she is a friend. She deserves the opportunity to have her story heard.” https://t.co/jn4uoYXsNp — Simon Hedlin (@simonhedlin) February 7, 2019

If her story is heard, Fairfax’s career is over. The best he can hope for is to limp along until his term ends and then just go away.

A larger issue is what to do about Bobby Scott, and I imagine quite a few more like him, who made the decision to hide the allegations against Fairfax out of party loyalty or simply for political advantage.

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