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Proposed bill honors last surviving Nuremberg prosecutor
Anna Paulina Luna removed her name from co-sponsoring a bipartisan bill that would rename a post office in Delray Beach in honor of Congressional Medal of Honor recipient Benjamin Ferencz, the chief U.S. prosecutor of Nazi death squads in the Nuremberg Trials.
The last surviving Nuremberg prosecutor, Ferencz fought as a soldier in Europe before convicting 22 Nazi war criminals of organizing and directing the murder of a million people.
“U.S. Rep. Anna Paulina Luna says her vote is payback against an unnamed Democrat who has been blocking a post office renaming she has sought,” the Tampa Bay Times reports.
Instead of honoring the war hero, Luna is sabotaging the renaming as payback against a colleague as part of her continued preoccupation with Washington politics.
Tampa Bay Times: Post office Kerfuffle fractures Florida’s congressional delegation
William March | November 10, 2023
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There’s usually nothing less controversial in the U.S. Congress than naming post offices.
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But a kerfuffle on names has split the Florida delegation, with Republican Rep. Anna Paulina Luna of St. Petersburg, along with Republicans Matt Gaetz and Greg Steube, blocking the naming of a Delray Beach post office for a hero of the Nazi Holocaust.
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Rep. Lois Frankel, D-West Palm Beach, filed a bill to name the post office after Benjamin Berell Ferencz, an American lawyer who investigated and led the prosecution in the Nuremberg trials of the Einsatzgruppen, murder squads that slaughtered Jews and others in German-conquered territories.
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Luna also has blocked a bill by Darren Soto, D-Kissimmee, to name an office after the late Robert Guevara, a political leader in the Osceola County Puerto Rican community and the county’s first Puerto Rican commissioner.
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Renaming a post office requires unanimous consent of the state’s delegation. In a House floor statement Nov. 1, Gaetz said he withdrew from the Frankel bill “with great regret and hopefully temporarily.”
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Luna said a Florida Democratic congresswoman, whom she wouldn’t name, “has chosen to use her power to hold up the renaming, due to what I’m told is a petty personal grievance with me.”
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