It is Eid al-Adha, one of the holiest days of the Islamic calendar, and Detroit’s next full-term congresswoman — who in November is expected to become one of the first two Muslim women elected to the U.S. House — is rolling through southwest Detroit, snapping pictures of homes with her cell phone.

“I’m texting these to the commander right now,” Rashida Tlaib says, tapping away.

Let’s just say it’s not your typical visit with a politician, with her doing the driving and no staffers or handlers around. But then, Tlaib (pronounced tah-LEEB), a 42-year-old social justice lawyer, activist and former state representative, is not your everyday office-seeker.

A couple of hours before, the divorced mother of two young boys rushed into her office in the Cass Corridor after Eid al-Adha prayers at the Islamic Center of Detroit on Tireman, late for a meeting, boys in tow, dashing on makeup before a photographer turned on a video camera (“I’m not a makeup girl!” she pleaded).

She then spent much of the morning checking on 7-year-old Yousif, who, after a mug for the camera and a hug from his mom, is set up with water and a game nearby, and trying to coax, cajole and jokingly cow her older son, 13-year-old Adam, not to pound quite so loudly on her office computer or make wry asides while she tries to answer a reporter’s questions about Democratic socialism.

Later, after dropping Adam and Yousif off at an aunt’s home, following an impressive series of calls to relatives — she is the oldest of 14 siblings — the soon-to-be-congresswoman abruptly pulled into a driveway on Rathbone, in her old neighborhood, big dogs running around loose, and disappeared into a house to talk privately with an old friend. She came out with a short list of homes where neighbors had reported seeing drug sales and prostitution and said she planned to take pictures of them and send them to police.

As in, she’s going to do this right now.

With her election in November no more than a formality given the overwhelmingly Democratic makeup of her Detroit/Downriver/western Wayne County district — and the lack of a Republican opponent — Tlaib, when she is sworn in Jan. 3, will make history, not only as a Muslim woman and the first Palestinian-American woman elected to Congress, but as the full-term replacement for U.S. Rep. John Conyers — a civil rights legend who ended a 53-year-long career amid scandal nine months ago. Given her district — and her willingness to make her voice heard — she also will become a national voice on poverty, civil rights, equality, crime and a whole range of urban issues, when she is sworn in on a 1734 translation of the Quran, apparently purchased by a curious Thomas Jefferson, that now resides in the Library of Congress.

Already, Tlaib has been the subject of interviews on CNN, MSBNC and elsewhere. The New York Times sent someone in to write up a profile. And while she has been criticized by some of her detractors as being more interested in publicity than in the compromises needed to get legislation passed — a criticism that her record does not necessarily support — and has demonstrated a propensity for crossing establishment forces on both sides, she’s set to become one of the most visible members of the state’s congressional delegation in a U.S. House that could potentially be under Democratic control by the time of her swearing-in. She'll also be a foil for Trump — and a proponent of his impeachment.

It’s worth mentioning as well that she’s talked about — along with Democratic nominees such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York and Ilhan Omar in Minnesota (the other female Muslim candidate who won a primary in the most Democratic congressional district in her state) — as representing a new generation of Democrats who could remake the party in Congress.

Only now, on Eid al-Adha, driving around her old neighborhood, none of that matters: She’s ‘Shida — laughing, ebullient, talking enthusiastically and confidently about her plans to remain a near-constant presence at home, to continue fighting against whatever her constituents need her to fight, be it water shutoffs or sweetheart deals for developers — whatever it takes to make life better in a district that is the second most impoverished in the country and has lost more people than any other.

And despite being derided by some in her past as a “carpet-bagger” — or as not belonging because she is an Arab and a Muslim in a majority black city — she does this all as a true Detroiter would, deftly handling traffic in a black Chevy Equinox and zipping around trucks twice her car’s size, pointing out this corner lot or that, and who keeps up their property and who doesn’t. She gregariously waves to old friends and takes a call in the full presence of a reporter and photographer from someone who wants to read her the riot act about correcting an offhand criticism she made in an interview at some point about officeholders seeming to support sports arenas downtown in part to get better seats for themselves.

There is no request, either, that this be off-the-record.

“Everything I say gets dissected now!” she laughs, hanging up the phone.

At one spot, driving again, she stops without warning or comment in the middle of a street to get out in her flip-flops and grab a plastic chair someone has left and moves it onto the sidewalk. Pulling up a short time later beside two workers not far from Marathon Oil’s refinery, she rolls down her window to ask —friendly as can be — who they work for. The men don’t answer, claim to only speak Spanish, and she guesses Marathon, which she and others blame, along with other industrial outfits, for demolished homes and concerns about air and health quality there.

“You hate it, don’t you?” she asks, and when they don’t respond, she answers for them, “Yeah, you hate it.”

Suffice it to say, ‘Shida is different: Energetic and passionate, friendly and engaging in conversation. She has an expressive face and smiling, easy eyes that seek out, individually, her listener — even when she’s driving and he’s sitting in the back seat. She can also get in your face. And challenge you. Or anybody.

But she is also less guarded than most politicians. Sometimes, she lets her thoughts outpace each other, racing ahead, spilling out, ideas and issues riffing off one another. It doesn’t always make sense; sometimes, she has to circle a point before finding it. But there is a genuineness to it. By all accounts, she campaigns at the hardest pace she can hit, which is harder than most. Seeing her running around southwest Detroit — talking, pointing, explaining — you can believe it.

“She is literally one of the most energetic people I’ve known,” said Steve Tobocman, a former state representative who hired her to work for him and then helped convince her to successfully run for his seat. He is still a member of Team Tlaib, working with her successful primary campaign in August when she won the nomination in a six-person field that included Detroit City Council President Brenda Jones, Westland Mayor Bill Wild, state Sen. Coleman A. Young II, state Sen. Ian Conyers and former state Rep. Shanelle Jackson for a full two-year term that begins in January.

“That 18-hour-a-day passion of hers,” Tobocman said, “she can’t turn it off, it seems.”

She has the battle scars to prove it as well.

A self-proclaimed “girl with a bullhorn,” Tlaib — who served three terms as a state rep before being term-limited in 2014 — has had well-publicized fights with Ambassador Bridge owner Manuel (Matty) Moroun over plans for a new span (and where she and others once stopped traffic), as well as with the state to move on mounds of toxic pet coke — a product of oil refining — piled next to the Detroit River. She pushed for cancer studies in the shadow of Marathon’s refinery — and bemoans the $175 million in tax abatements the city provided the company. In 2012, during a tense debate over abortion legislation, she suggested women withhold sex from men to make their point. And she has decried hundreds of millions in tax incentives for “adult playgrounds” — meaning sports facilities — in downtown Detroit that she says could be going to schools.

She fought for the #MeToo movement before it existed, breaking down in tears in 2013 as she described for the Free Press how an Arab-American civil rights advocate, Imad Hamad, had harassed her and others when they worked for him at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee — making references to her breasts, playing with her hair while she was on the phone. Hamad called the allegations unfounded but eventually retired nonetheless.

And in 2016, she was escorted out of then-candidate Donald Trump’s speech at the Detroit Economic Club after shouting at him that the nation’s children “deserve better” and that given his remarks, about Muslims, about immigrants, he should read the Constitution.

In her office at the Sugar Law Center for Economic and Social Justice — where she has worked in recent years as a lawyer, working to combat emissions at Marathon, restore revenue-sharing by the state to municipalities, and overturn the state’s emergency manager law — she is easy, friendly, shushing her boys, venting some mild motherly frustration, talking about how she nursed her younger son on the state House floor (which prompts a “that’s so disgusting” from Adam).

Then, she is off and talking about taking on the Koch Brothers (the pet coke on the Detroit riverfront belonged to a subsidiary owned by Charles and David Koch, the conservative industrialists) and Moroun over putting fencing around Riverside Park during a dispute with the city over his plans to build a second span and lengthy delays over Ambassador Bridge-related construction that sent trucks rumbling along residential streets.

At first, she balks at being labeled “confrontational” by a reporter. But then she shrugs it off.

“Confrontational or not, my approach to public service has always been fighting for my families,” she says. . “If I wasn’t confrontational, I never would have gotten the pet coke off the riverfront, which meant trespassing onto property, getting the samples tested on my own. And if that’s confrontational, to release the findings, even in opposition of what the state was telling me, which was ‘not toxic,’ then that’s what I’ll do. And if it’s confrontational that Matty Moroun was in court for over a year. … I could feel my blood just boil because I just could not understand how he could be able to do that, to take a park (Riverside Park), to build a bridge without a permit. ... And so, yes, for 45 minutes, myself and a number of residents blocked trucks and demanded that they be removed and, yes, if that is what needs to be done, as a member of Congress, to really give a voice to my families, it’s going to happen.”

Comments of carpet-bagging aside, Rashida Harbi Elabed — she took the last name of her ex-husband, Fayez Tlaib, when they were married in 1998 and kept it — is and remains a Detroiter. She was born and raised in southwest, where her father, Harbi Elabed, and her mother, Fatima, settled. Harbi Elabed, despite being impoverished at times, made it to Detroit from Jerusalem, via Nicaragua, and worked the line at Ford’s Flat Rock Assembly Plant; Tlaib's mother came from a small village in Palestine.

As the oldest, Rashida sometimes acted as a third parent to the huge family, “changing diapers,” as she said in a 2008 interview with the Free Press, “while juggling homework and school activities” in a working-class household that her parents sometimes struggled financially to keep afloat. She had to learn English as a second language — having spoken only Arabic at home — and she never really learned Spanish, despite the number of Spanish speakers in southwestern Detroit.

She’s an observant Muslim, and proud of her faith, but does not attend prayers as often as some. (She’s quick to correct Adam when he suggests his papa’s more religious and took up the faith more quickly — saying, “You wish.”) She and her husband divorced in the last few years. Her father died last December. For most of 30 years, she lived in and around what is called Springwells, then moved to an apartment with her boys in New Center in the last year or so.

As evidenced by the series of calls that led to a place to drop off her boys later, she and her siblings remain close. As evidenced by everyone she still seems to know in southwest Detroit, she never really left her old neighborhood.

“My dad was so proud. My dad also had the Latino culture of growing up in Nicaragua and so that was the mixture in my home. Being in southwest Detroit when my dad would want to say anything about me or my brothers or sisters, he would start speaking in Spanish to my uncle and my grandmother because we didn’t understand. … I remember my dad cooking different kinds of foods from Central America and things of that nature but (through) all of that is the fact that I knew we were Palestinian, I knew we were Arab, knew my dad went through various challenges.”

“Every time I complained about ‘It’s so hard,’ he’d say, ‘I was this … he wouldn’t tell me how old but he’d just show me, this is how small he was, and he used to carry people’s groceries on his back throughout the old city in Jerusalem. He actually lived in the old city before he went to Nicaragua. But he always would say it was harder for (him) and you have nothing to complain about.”

She acknowledges that, for some in her faith community, she’s not “Muslim enough,” though she says she believes Allah — whom she believes is a woman if anything — understands. “As long as she knows that I am, um … giving back and doing things that I think are reflective of Islam. …” she said.

She is a product of Southwestern High School, Wayne State University, and Cooley Law School in Lansing. While friends moved on to corporate jobs, she went to work in Dearborn for ACCESS, the Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services. She was working there when Tobocman — who was working on an in-state tuition bill for the children of immigrants — met her. When he became the Democratic floor leader in 2006, he hired her.

What he found, he said, was someone who was “incredibly passionate about constituent service” and worked near-continuously. But when he urged her to run for his seat, she — like a lot of women, and especially women of color, he said — needed convincing.

“They are worried they are not what it looks like to lead,” he said. But he convinced her. Winning 44 percent of the Democratic primary vote in an eight-person field, she won easily, her closest competitor getting just 26 percent of the vote. She would go on, said Tobocman, to revolutionize and expand tax services and other constituent relations.

As for her family, however, they are not monolithic: Asked whether she knows anyone who voted for Trump, she nods, saying one of her brothers did.

“Everybody has one in their family. … We use a lot of humor when we get together,” she says. “I’m still trying to figure him out. I love him. We came from the same parents, from the same household. … He’s angry, he’s angry with what’s going on in politics. Does that mean he’s not a Democrat anymore? No. He supports me and he supports other Democrats. But he is furious. He’s furious that he doesn’t feel like he’s got a seat at the table.”

Sometimes it starts to get heated between them, she admits. “And I’m like, um, we’re going to end this conversation so my mother is not upset,” she laughs. “But yeah, of course, I have interactions with Trump supporters.”

As for her boys, they will stay in Detroit — mostly — when she goes to Washington, though she expects to have them on the floor there with her, too. And whenever she can, she will be back in the district, not just in Detroit but in Westland, in Romulus, in Inkster. People can probably expect to see the kids with her there, too.

“My kids,” she says, looking at them spread out in her office, “come with me a lot.”

It’s worth noting that even though Tlaib in recent weeks has been getting lots of national attention, almost as if she came out of nowhere, she didn’t. No one who knows Michigan politics was surprised that, once she got into the race to replace Conyers, she made a contest of it.

She was already known as an energetic, disciplined campaigner, able to raise money and connect with voters. In 2012, redistricted into a seat with another incumbent, state Rep. Maureen Stapleton of Detroit, Tlaib won the Democratic primary by less than 700 votes — and cruised in the general. In 2014, she lost a race against state Sen. Virgil Smith for his seat, which he later gave up after being incarcerated for shooting at his ex-wife’s car. Tlaib lost that race by less than 2,000 votes against an incumbent.

Still, her race for the 13th Congressional District seat — which came open when Conyers stepped down amid allegations, which he denied, that he'd harassed or otherwise mistreated women who worked for him over the years — was of a different order. The bulk of the institutional support, from Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan, most of the unions and the black clergy, had gone to Brenda Jones, the City Council president and a well-known political figure.

'Stakeholders' back Jones to replace Conyers

Jones would go on to win the Democratic primary to serve out the brief two-month remainder of Conyers’ term beginning after the Nov. 6 general election, beating Tlaib, Wild and Ian Conyers. But in the Democratic race for the next two-year term, Tlaib won — by 900 votes — over Jones, being greatly helped by the larger field and Young — who did not run for the partial term — likely siphoning off some votes in Detroit that could have gone for Jones.

And while Jones beat Tlaib in Detroit by more than 5,000 votes and Wild won in Westland, the next largest community in the district, Tlaib scored consistently well enough across the entire district — coming in first or second in every community — to make up the difference.

Tlaib also raised a prodigious amount — $1.07 million — compared with $536,000 for Wild and just $183,000 for Jones. And while a whisper campaign complained that the bulk of her individual donations came from outside Michigan — which, she says, started flowing in earnest in June after the Supreme Court upheld Trump’s travel ban for people from several majority Muslim nations — it’s of note that she still raised more ($268,000) in-state than Jones did overall.

“Rashida was the only candidate prepared to run," said Target Insyght pollster Ed Sarpolus, whose surveys in July showed Tlaib had a chance to win and credited her with investing heavily in TV ads in the weeks leading up to the election to get her name out. “She did what was right. … The bottom line is no one works more than she does and no one’s more willing to go out and do what it takes to win.”

Tlaib is unabashed about her smarts when it comes to political strategy and the issues but her greatest asset may be her desire to outwork everyone, knocking on as many doors as she can get to, talking to as many people as she can. For the campaign, that meant hitting not only Detroit but Dearborn Heights, Ecorse, Garden City, Redford Township. It meant letting people know that the establishment — Democratic or otherwise — didn’t necessarily speak for her or her for it.

“They’re in, and it’s not soft support,” she told the Free Press before her election of her efforts at reaching voters. “You can’t peel them off.”



After Tlaib’s election, the Associated Press reported on how people in the Palestinian village where her mother was born were celebrating. A former mayor — a distant relative — called it “a great honor” and opined that “she will serve Palestine — for sure she will serve the interests of her nation.”

And it is her Muslim and Palestinian heritage that will help her make history, as she is set to become the third Muslim, along with Ilhan Omar and behind U.S. Reps. Keith Ellison, D-Minn., and Andre Carson, D-Ind., sworn in to Congress and joining another Michigander — U.S. Rep. Justin Amash, R-Cascade Township, who was elected in 2010 — as the first Palestinian-Americans in the House.

But Tlaib has not actively sought to make Middle East politics a central part of her campaign. She has protested the travel ban and urges a “peaceful resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict that prioritizes peace, justice, quality and dignity” for all — but those issues are nowhere on her “priorities” page on her campaign website, which instead is peppered with items calling for a $15-an-hour minimum wage, immigration reform, a “Medicare-for-all” health plan, better education and civil and environmental rights. Ask her what she wants to do most in Congress and she talks — at length and in detail — about expanding federal civil rights laws to account for instances of disparate impact, when facially neutral laws still disproportionately affect people of color, or of ending practices such as territorial rating and redlining that result in low-income communities paying excessive amounts for insurance.

She’d get rid of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, not because there shouldn’t be anyone to enforce and protect the borders, but because, to her, ICE has been militarized and is being misused — as in family separations — and, prior to its creation in 2003, there was a better, less aggressive system in place.

Meanwhile, she wants to open community service centers across the district, where constituents can get direct access and information on federal resources.

She acknowledges being a “Democratic socialist,” like Ocasio-Cortez, but she says she’s far less focused on labels than on helping her individual constituents. And as much as she wants to push economic development, when it comes to issues such as health and welfare, air and water quality, she likes to point out — as she heard from a resident: “Jobs can’t fix cancer. Jobs can’t fix respiratory issues.”

When it comes to her feelings about Detroit’s automakers and fuel standards — or emission standards, generally, regardless of the source — she reminds that some of her future constituents are in some of the most toxic ZIP codes in the state, and that some of them are already conveying their worries about groundwater pollution from a Ford plant in Livonia spreading their way as well as long-standing concerns about air and water quality. (Ford reported it two years ago and the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality is requiring it to monitor its spread even as homeowners worry it could affect their properties.)

“Look, I’m going to use my position as leverage to bring a different voice to that issue,” she says, sitting in her office in the Cass Corridor, surrounded by posters and awards, a magazine cover with Michelle Obama’s photo on it and a quote from Khalil Gibran: “You see but your shadow when you turn your back to the sun.”

"There is a responsibility by the Big Three, especially here in Michigan. … We have 1 in 5 children with asthma within three of my ZIP codes. … And for me, they really inspire me to speak up. They understand that for us to just give this blanket green light to the Big Three because they are a big job provider is not the right approach. They want me to be a voice and to speak up and push back a little bit. And expect more. Expect more from those that are in the manufacturing industry in our communities. They get a lot from us. Not only the workforce, the tax breaks … and it’s about time they recognized their moral duty to help us fix this issue around our environment and our health, our public health.”

Talk about the Cass Corridor and she says that while development is great, some of her small businesses feel like they’re being left out when streets get shut down for an event at Little Caesars Arena. Or talk about downtown or the numerous other communities in her district, and she wonders why there isn’t more in terms of community benefits — jobs, housing, pollution controls — from companies or developers who get incentives from government.

Drive by shuttered Southwestern High School, her alma mater, and she talks about twice trying to block crews heading in to close it, and how the redevelopment that was supposed to occur, hasn’t.

“Broken promises, right here,” she says, outside the car, then looks down at a manhole cover, mentioning the smell. “That’s hydrogen sulfide, from the sewers.”

“Everybody’s like, ‘I hope you guys don’t change. I hope, Rashida, you don’t change.’ And (I’m) like, ‘I got kids, I got things here that keep me rooted that will not allow my lens to change.’ "

In some ways, Tlaib’s rise mirrors that of Conyers. Back in the ‘60s and ‘70s, it was the Detroit congressman who ended up on President Richard Nixon’s enemies list as a “leading black anti-Nixon spokesman” and who called for investigations into the Vietnam War and reparations for blacks. From a civil rights standpoint, there is little if any distance between them.

There is one difference, however: Tlaib isn’t black. In fact, when the 116th Congress is sworn in, it will be the first since 1955 that does not include a black Detroiter — a point to which Tlaib seems genuinely sympathetic.

“I struggled with it at the beginning,” she acknowledges. “Because (it’s) just like me wanting to see … having young people look up and say, ‘Oh look at that brown girl, she has a similar name or she has the same faith.’ … I really truly respect and honor the fact that the majority of my district is African-American and that I have to make sure that I surround myself with people with that lens.”

But if Tlaib has problems going forward, it could have less to do with her race than her politics: After all, it’s not lost on anyone in the district that she has been at odds with powerful developers named Ilitch and Gilbert over what the community should get back for their projects; it’s also not lost on anyone that, come 2020, it’s entirely likely she won’t face a six-person field.

“The largest part of the district voted for a white mayor (Duggan) so that’s not a problem,” said Jonathan Kinloch, chairman of the 13th Congressional District Democratic Party who was part of the group of establishment stakeholders who endorsed Jones earlier this year. “They (new members of Congress) really only have one free year (before getting ready for the next election). … Rashida should spend a lot of time forging relationships. It was a razor-thin victory.”

And while Kinloch doesn’t believe Tlaib will have any trouble doing so if she tries, he acknowledges that there could be concerns from those in Detroit who want to see development continue. “She’s got a lot of work to do to make sure developers feel that she’s not a roadblock,” he said.

As for Tlaib, she says she’s not worried about 2020 — or 2022, which will occur after redistricting, a fact she said someone was quick to mention to her within 48 hours of her winning the primary.

The whole question seems to make her feel exasperated, believing as she does that if she takes care of her constituents, they will take care of her. But it’s a fair one, given political realities.

It’s one, too, that came up during the campaign — her willingness to compromise to get bills passed, to focus on the legislative process, to find allies. A shadow effort on Facebook by a group called United for Progress suggested she had little to show for six years in the state House. Democratic consultant Joe DiSano — who worked with Virgil Smith’s 2014 campaign and whose wife, Susan Demas, is spokeswoman for United for Progress, though he said he did not know who was funding that effort or have anything to do with it — openly criticized Tlaib, saying she did little, calling her “the first person to rush in front of a camera, the last person to close a deal.”

“She’s not in the room when the deals are made because she’s outside,” DiSano said. “She’s a legitimate political figure. (But) I think she’s smoke and mirrors and loud noise. … There’s no question she’s got a tremendous work ethic. But what is the result?”

Contrast that with the people who say she got plenty done, including bills to crack down on scrap metal thieves, secure millions in funding for before- and after-school programs and help to create a community court system for the state that lets offenders of certain misdemeanors have their charges dismissed on completion of a community service program. Michigan police made her their legislator of the year in 2014.

After winning the congressional primary, the first Republican to call her and congratulate her was Matt Lori, a deputy director in the state Department of Health and Human Services and a former state rep who worked with Tlaib. As he put it, they came from widely different backgrounds and political persuasions, but he was impressed by the effort she put forward. “I just think she is an outstanding person, given her passion and drive.”

She can make missteps, however: In the days after her election, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, J-Street, which promotes Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts, withdrew its endorsement of her when she said in an interview that she supported a one-state solution in the Mideast, not a two-state one as J-Street requires for its support. It left in question whether Tlaib had told — or at least strongly suggested — to J-Street that she was for a two-state solution and then, after winning the primary, changed her mind.

Tlaib later clarified that what she supports is “what the people on the ground there desire, may it be (a) one- or two-state solution to the conflict so long as it accomplishes the goals of peace, security, justice, equality and dignity for all people, regardless of identity.” But it still left some people wondering why she sought out the endorsement if her position didn’t align with J-Street’s.

DiSano called it proof that “she’s inherently dishonest.” Tobocman, who is Jewish, suggested otherwise, however, saying the question of Israeli-Palestinian relations is “a highly sensitive world of language” and that Tlaib “speaks from the heart.” If she crossed herself up getting deeper into an issue that is not front and center for her, he still believes “she’ll be a positive force in a lasting, safe solution.”

And — Tobocman reminded a reporter — this is not a 13th District issue. In a district where 30 percent of the population lives under the poverty line, a district that has lost nearly 38,000 people since the last Census, constituent service is what counts. And that, Tlaib believes, is her weapon.

“I think that all politics is local,” she says. “I don’t care if you are the mayor, the governor of our state. Everything is local. Elevating my families’ voices, the small businesses, the residents, the single woman who is trying to get through school and work full-time, every single voice, no matter all the levels of government, if they’re calling me about a city issue, county issue, a state issue, it’s not like I’m going to turn them away. I didn’t do it when I was a state rep and 80 percent of the calls were city issues. … There are so many resources available now for families, they just don’t know about it and that’s why the neighborhood service centers are so critical.”

What she has been hearing from people is — just like her brother — they don’t feel they have “a seat at the table.” And having taken her own brand of hard work and audacity and won over a field that included a Detroiter of the name recognition of Jones and a notable Wayne County outsider in Westland’s Bill Wild, she plans to give them that seat, and not just in Congress — in city halls across the district, in Lansing, on the picket lines and protest lines if necessary, wherever she can be heard. And if others believe she should stick to federal issues, she says … too bad.

Tlaib feels that any difficulties she has had have always stemmed from not being part of the old Detroit political establishment anyway. “It continues to be part of the struggle,” she said.

“I think as a member of Congress, showing up to a City Council hearing, to fight back alongside my small businesses, about the unfairness they have to abide by certain ordinances but the bigger developers don’t — that imbalance, the fact that they don’t feel like they are being heard — me being there helps elevate their voice…”

She stops. Adam has really been letting the keyboard at her computer have it.

“Wow, Adam,” she says, “Really?”

Finally, the interview is over and we’re off to tour the district. Only first, we have to drop off the kids at the available aunt’s. Tlaib's behind the wheel, zipping along — the photographer in the front seat, the reporter squeezed in the back with the kids.

Adam, it turns out, is quite the pistol.

“I wonder what Bill Wild is doing today?” he blurts out loudly, his mother shushing him insistently.

Contact Todd Spangler: tspangler@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter at @tsspangler.