The latest poll in the LA mayor’s race is brutal for incumbent Karen Bass. If she doesn’t start making her case now, she will lose — and the socialist “red wave” will come to LA.
Page A2From§Eachthe early evening edition — 23 September 2026
Bass skips the $1 billion waste-and-fraud hearing, gets heckled on camera, and the press finally finds her boyfriend
As it ran on the front
Karen Bass had a scheduling conflict. On September 4th her legal counsel wrote a letter declining an invitation from the House oversight committee, the one probing $1 billion in alleged waste and fraud inside the city's homelessness system. The mayor could not make it the week of September 15th. DC powerbrokers on the panel found the swerve hard to swallow, calling it "contempt and shameful," language usually saved for people who show up in handcuffs, not for people who simply don't show up.
The next day, September 16th, Bass proved she does still show up in public — just not to Congress. A City Hall regular named Armando Herman stormed a council meeting and unloaded on her in front of the room's sitting councilors, a scene captured on camera because City Hall meetings, unlike congressional hearings on billion-dollar shortfalls, still happen where a lens can find her. The mayor who was too busy for a subcommittee was not too busy to be ambushed by a local gadfly with a grievance and an open mic.…
…(cont) By September 23rd the New York Post had run two more items. One told Bass to start making her case, citing poll numbers bad enough to cost her the office. The other told readers who Melvin E. Clark Jr. is — the transit official Bass has been quietly dating, unmasked in print as her boyfriend after months of staying out of the paper entirely.
Line those four dates up and the shape isn't hard to read. A subpoena request gets a legal letter back. A council meeting gets a heckler on tape. A billion dollars in alleged fraud gets no mayor in the room to answer for it, while a private relationship gets a name, a job title, and a headline, in the very same stretch of news cycle. The hearing didn't happen. The questions about where the money went didn't get asked in front of anybody who could make her answer them.
That isn't a coincidence of timing so much as it is the mechanics of a dodge. Skip the room where the hard question lives long enough, and reporters find another room to fill. Los Angeles still doesn't know what happened to the billion dollars its homelessness system was supposed to spend. It does now know his name, his job, and how long they've been together — information nobody in that oversight hearing was asking for, delivered anyway, right on schedule.
“A congressional committee asks where a billion dollars in homelessness money went, and the mayor's lawyer sends a letter instead of a person. That's the whole trick — you starve the room that asks hard questions, and the press fills the vacuum with a boyfriend's name and job title, and somehow that's the story that runs. The money's still gone, the room's still empty, and the only thing that got fully identified this month is the guy she's dating.”
“She didn't skip the hearing, her counsel simply declined an invitation, that's a scheduling matter, not a cover-up. The heckler thing, that happens to every mayor at these meetings, it's not exactly evidence of anything. Look, the real issue here is her poll numbers are soft and she needs to start making her case to voters — wait, that's not helping her, forget I said that.”
The receipts
Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass has kept her relationship with longtime partner Melvin E. Clark Jr. largely private.
· DC powerbrokers rip Karen Bass for swerving grilling on $1B scandal: ‘Contempt and shameful’ from the morgue, 15 Sep 2026
· Wild moment notorious LA City Hall pest storms meeting and humiliates Karen Bass in front of stunned councilors from the morgue, 16 Sep 2026
· Karen Bass is just too busy to answer for her record on homelessness from the morgue, 8 Sep 2026
· Bass refuses to testify on Los Angeles homelessness before Congress from the morgue, 8 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.