The request came from her own staff, not from us: a sit-down with no legislative agenda attached, meant for an audience that doesn't spend its mornings reading Assembly transcripts. "People know her votes," a scheduling aide told me beforehand. "Most of them couldn't tell you anything else." Thoss herself seemed faintly amused by the premise, and faintly resigned to it, in roughly equal measure.
We covered the ordinary ground first — Selvane, her early years, the long path through the Assembly before any of this was thinkable. She answers these the way she answers everything on the record: plainly, without much interest in making it sound better than it was.
On Mentors
Asked who shaped her most before politics, she didn't hesitate, though she also didn't elaborate much further than the question asked.
"I interned for a judge during law school. Herbert Sole — he sat on the federal appellate bench, out of Selvane. Two years, before I finished my degree."
She mentioned, almost as an aside, that Sole was the one who first suggested she think about politics rather than law.
"He told me I should consider politics instead of the bar. I remember being annoyed about it at the time — I'd worked hard to get that internship. He wasn't wrong, apparently."
The relationship, by her account, wasn't one-directional. When I asked whether they'd stayed in touch, she mentioned his retirement — and a piece of advice that went the other way.
"When he was getting ready to retire, he kept talking about the Judicial Pool — whether he should apply, whether it was worth it at his age. He'd bring it up, then talk himself out of it, then bring it up again a few months later. I told him to stop deciding and just do it. He'd pushed me once. Seemed only fair to return it."
She didn't say whether he took the advice, and the conversation moved on before I thought to ask directly.
On the Rest of It
The remaining twenty minutes covered less ground than the first ten — a few questions about the Assembly years, a brief and characteristically unsentimental answer about why she ran for the seat that eventually led here. Nothing in the sit-down resembled a policy interview, which seemed to be exactly the point. Asked at the end whether she'd do another one of these, she considered it for a moment.
"Ask me again in a year."