DETROIT -- When Monica Conyers, president pro tem of Detroit's City Council, called the council president "Shrek" during an angry exchange at a hearing in April, one city resident found the remark immature.
"That's something a second-grader would do," says 13-year-old Keiara Bell.
During a panel discussion Ms. Conyers had with local schoolchildren two weeks after making the remark, Miss Bell admonished the 43-year-old Ms. Conyers for her behavior. The eighth-grader didn't back down when the councilwoman engaged her in debate.
Ms. Conyers was peppered with questions by Miss Bell, who said, "You're an adult. We have to look up to you. We're looking on TV and we're like, 'This is an adult calling another adult a Shrek?'"
Ms. Conyers is the wife of U.S. Rep. John Conyers Jr., the chairman of the House Committee on the Judiciary. She declined to comment for this story, but her chief of staff, Linda Bernard, says Ms. Conyers believes she is "being targeted by the press" because "her husband was recently in New York City and is considering having hearings about police brutality."
In Miss Bell, Motown has found an unlikely folk hero: a child demanding that politicians exercise civility and restraint. Her parents, Marsha and Harry Bell, say they are proud of their daughter's poise and grit. "That's my baby," says Mrs. Bell in an interview. The mother of four sells candy in Detroit neighborhoods from the trunk of an old gray Cadillac.
Conyers' husband is one of the wackiest of the wacky left members of Congress - always pushing for impeachment or filing bogus subpoenas against Bush Administration officials. There's not a lot of civility in that family on a good day.
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