Rep. Mary Franson walked into her first hearing of the day Thursday -- and into a wall of cameras and a crowd of protesters shouting for her resignation.
"Hey, Franson, we're at your door, stop the war on the poor," at least a dozen protesters chanted outside the House agriculture committee, as Franson sidestepped the crowd and entered the hearing room through a side door.
The first-term Republican from Alexandria has been under fire since she posted a video last Friday that compared food stamps to feeding wild animals and making them "dependent."
"My baby is not an animal," shouted Cicely Matz of St. Anthony, who followed Franson into the hearing room and raised her infant high in the air for the committee to see. Matz said she works 40 hours a week and still doesn't earn enough to feed her family without food assistance from the state.
The House Agriculture and Rural Development Policy Finance Committee isn't usually a hotbed of controversy, and committee Chairman Rod Hamilton, R-Mountain Lake, appealed for calm. The committee was meeting to debate a bill about horses and another about ethanol.
"Ma'am, you have a beautiful baby," Hamilton assured Matz, as the protesters filed out to continue their demonstration in the lobby.
Outside, they continued to chant and wave signs with slogans like "Don't Feed the Politicians," and "If people are animals, then Mary Franson is a rat."
Franson sat, smiling and composed, through the hearing and kept her attention focused on her iPad. She refused to speak with reporters before or afterward, but she did take to Twitter to turn the protest into a campaign fundraising opportunity.
"Please donate to fransonforstatehouse.com -- The War on Women has come to MN." she tweeted.
Two hours later, she tweeted an update: "my treasurer sent out the tweet. He is in Alexandria....... My campaign people have my password."
Reached by email, Shane Marshall, treasurer of the "Patriots for Mary Franson" committee, confirmed: "Yes, as finance manager I use Mary's twitter account to raise funds for her campaign. Mary has been receiving a lot of support with the publicity she has been receiving lately and this has had a positive impact on donations."
Franson tweeted an apology last week and removed the video (although copies remain online.). But protesters, members of the Welfare Rights Committee, said they wanted more than an apology -- they wanted her resignation.
"She thought the clip was funny. But letg me tell you, Rep. Franson, there is nothing funny about hunger," said Angel Buechner. "
While the Welfare Rights Committee was picketing in the basement of the State Office Building, the Alliance for a Better Minnesota visited her fourth-floor offices to deliver a petition calling on Franson to make another video -- this one, an apology for her last video.
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