Joyce Beatty is playing a dangerous game

Why are her constituents learning about her multiple surgeries in a TikTok from one of the least charismatic members of Congress?

Congresswoman Joyce Beatty (D-Columbus) has become emblematic of a major problem plaguing the Democratic Party.

On June 11, Congressional Democrats fell four votes short of blocking a bill that ended nearly $9 billion in public media and foreign aid funding.

Beatty was one of the four missing votes, with the three others belonging to former colleagues who died in office rather than pass the torch to the next generation, despite fascism knocking on America’s door.

And, sure, the Democrats would have lost that particular vote even if Beatty had done the job for which she was elected. But her absence belied a bigger problem afoot for the Congresswoman.

On June 13, The Rooster reported that Beatty had been navigating Capitol Hill in a wheelchair in recent weeks. On June 16, The Rooster confirmed what Rachel Coyle of Ohioans Against Extremism first reported: Beatty had missed that pivotal vote due to non-emergency hip surgery.

On June 18, Cole Behrens of The Columbus Dispatch reported Beatty’s officer remained “mum” on a return to work after undergoing a non-specified surgery “that couldn’t be delayed,” which is the opposite of a non-emergency surgery.

That gave me grave concerns about Beatty’s ability to do basic functions of the high-stakes jobs that she pursued, especially with the National Suicide Bill—which could have been killed in the cradle had those aforementioned three Congressmen not died in office—approached the finish line in the lower legislative chamber.

But last week, Beatty, to her credit, proved her haters wrong by showing that she was alive ahead of the pivotal vote on the National Suicide Bill. Although she did so while wearing what appeared to be a dinner plate over her eye after an apparent surgery that even I hadn’t heard about.

You might think that a 75-year-old undergoing multiple surgeries might push them toward retirement. But that’s not the ethos of current Democratic House leadership.

While Beatty eschewed the wheelchair to stand for the picture, albeit with a dinner plate over her eye, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) later donned the aura of a nursing home attendant by praising the wheelchair-bound Beatty for the courage to do basic functions of the job for which she’s well compensated.

It’s hard to believe that multiple staff thought this TikTok was a good idea. Beatty’s office clearly didn’t want this image of her—wheelchair bound and holding a cane—out in public, apparently until the moment it couldn’t be hidden any further.

At which point, Beatty and Jeffries apparently decided to lean into the image and paint Beatty’s flying 50 minutes to Washington D.C. as some heroic act worthy of a Gold Star.

You can read the TikTok comments yourself and judge how this went over the types of voters that Democrats need to win elections.

A couple of hours after I posted that TikTok to Twitter, Beatty’s staff once again stonewalled the local paper of record about her various ailments, which, again, she had just used to gin up sympathy in a Democratic propaganda video.

From Shahid Meighan of The Columbus Dispatch:

The Dispatch reached out to Beatty's office on July 2 to confirm details about her health, including questions about her eye covering seeing in a photograph and a report that she was using a wheelchair. Her spokesperson, Christine Thompson, said she would have to check with Beatty's team before responding.

In a text later, Thompson said, "The congresswoman is feeling good." She did not address the issue of the eye covering or the wheelchair report.

To the Congresswoman’s credit, she did sound more cogent than I would have expected if I saw a random 75-year-old with an eyepatch and cane being wheeled around Columbus by her subordinates.

But why are her constituents—at least the ones lacking the constitutional fortitude to subscribe to The Rooster—learning about her multiple(!) surgeries in a TikTok from one of the least charismatic members of Congress?

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This isn’t a comparable situation to Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur (D-Toledo), who proved she’s not on cocaine like a lot of her colleagues when she fell asleep during Leader Jeffries’ grandstanding oratory to delay the inevitable by a couple of hours.

Kaptur, for better or worse, is the only name that stands a chance of winning in the Ohio Ninth Congressional District, which will be redrawn this summer to further favor the Republican nominee.

Even if Kaptur loses, forcing the National Republican Congressional Committee to spend millions of dollars against her will be a win in and of itself.

But Beatty? She represents a district where a wet sponge (or worse, a communist blogger) would win in a landslide with a (D) next to their name, thanks to the deal Beatty cut with Ohio Republicans back in 2011.

Two sources recently told me that Beatty intends to run for a final term in 2026. I didn’t want to believe them. But I’m feeling differently after seeing this debacle around basic communications about her surgeries.

And while Beatty’s political capital has never been lower with voters in Ohio’s Third Congressional District, it’s not as if a viable challenger awaits in the wings. Unseating Beatty would take at least two million dollars, and the only possible candidate, Morgan Harper, hasn’t shown any public interest in taking another crack at Beatty.

Ironically, the best out-of-the-box candidate might be Dr. Hasan Kwame Jeffries, an Ohio State professor and brother to Leader Jeffries, if you can believe that:

Dr. Jeffries’ hypothetical candidacy, however, is wishcasting on my part.

The rest of the establishment candidates, from Franklin County Auditor Michael Stinziano to Franklin County Commissioners Kevin Boyce or Erica Crawley, would never in their lives have the courage to upset the local apple cart by challenging Beatty.

They’re all more than willing to wait two years in hopes of earning her endorsement as her replacement.

No, if Beatty is going to do the right thing, she’ll have to come to that decision on her own. It should be an easy one, even if she “feels good.” The stakes are too high, especially since she just watched the Republicans pass the National Suicide Bill over the dead bodies of her former colleagues.

Because if Beatty were, God forbid, to follow her three colleagues off this mortal coil while still serving in Congress, Ohio Governor Mike DeWine or, God forbid, Governor Vivek Ramaswamy, would delay the special election of her replacement to maintain a Republican advantage as long as legally possible.

I doubt that’s how she wants to be remembered.

Thanks for the update, Sherrod!

As I wrote on July 2, former Senator Sherrod Brown is overcooking my grits with his waffling on whether he’ll run for governor, for Senate, or maybe not at all!

Roughly 24 hours later, Brown gave what I can only assume was a quote engineered to annoy me to a national political reporter.