You might call it the case of Rashida vs. Goliath. She is the daughter of Palestinian refugees, a 33-year-old Detroiter who is the eldest of 14 kids. Rashida Tlaib's father came here because he got a job working on the line for the Ford Motor Co.
Her husband in turn works on the line today, for an automotive supplier. They have a 4-year-old boy and are anything but rich.
He is a billionaire. Eighty two-year-old Manuel J. Moroun owns the most economically important border crossing in the country, the Ambassador Bridge. He is politically powerful -- and is now, apparently, trying to take her down. Yet she isn't worried.
Why should she be? The fact is that State Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Detroit, has a testimonial to the American Dream -- and one of the more amazing success stories in the Michigan Legislature.
Not too many years ago she was trying to juggle being a baby sitter for her vast pack of siblings and go to school. She became the first member of her family to graduate from high school.
When she was 21 she married. But unlike many traditional Muslim women, that wasn't enough for her. She earned a bachelor's degree in political science from Wayne State University.
Six years later, she took home a law degree. She worked as a community organizer, then got a job with a Jewish legislator named Steve Tobocman, the grandson of Polish immigrants who fled the Holocaust. How did that go, a young Palestinian working for a Jew? They hit it off so well she became his choice to succeed him when term limits meant he had to leave at the end of last year.
But that seemed impossible. There are few Arab-Americans -- maybe 2 percent -- in her Southwest Detroit district. The voters are 40 percent Hispanic, 25 percent black.
Formidable challengers entered the primary. She won it in a landslide, and took 90 percent in the general election, to become only the second Muslim woman in history to serve in a state legislature.
"I wouldn't be here today if my Jewish boss hadn't encouraged me," she said when she took office.
What she cares about is her constituents -- and that has landed her in trouble with Moroun. "What this is about is, first of all, air quality," she told me this week, driving back from Lansing.
Twenty percent of the kids in her district have asthma. "Ten thousand trucks a day pass over that bridge," sometimes waiting in line for hours, she said. Her own son, Adam, has to use an inhaler.
And now Moroun wants to build a new bridge, right next to the old one. That worries her. It could mean even more pollution.
There's an alternative: Another bridge, jointly and internationally owned, a mile downstream, an idea being pushed by a consortium called DRIC, for Detroit River International Crossing. Tlaib isn't all that crazy about that bridge, which would also be in her district, because it would mean more air pollution too.
But that makes much more sense to her than twinning the Ambassador Bridge. "At least you'd have transparency and accountability," something notoriously lacking with Moroun's privately owned Detroit International Bridge Co.
She has been trying since she was first elected to have an environmental impact study done before any new bridge was built. The Ambassador Bridge Co. consistently stonewalled her.
Finally, her worries about the Ambassador Bridge turned to outrage when she realized that the company was already starting work on a second span, even though Canada has made it clear it does not want one. During her only meeting with Moroun, "I asked him why he was proceeding when Canada hadn't given him environmental clearance."
The magnate got hostile. "I don't come and tell you what to do in your backyard," he growled.
Then, last week, one of Detroit's most notorious political operatives, Adolph Mongo, announced he was starting a recall campaign against Tlaib. Mongo, a longtime paid supporter of former mayor and convicted felon Kwame Kilpatrick, is now working for the Ambassador Bridge Co.
"This is just an intimidation tactic," Rashida said, driving home from a late legislative session last week, anxious to see her husband and son. "They won't succeed. It's just frustrating that this will take time I could be using to help my constituents."
She knows Matty Moroun is a big political contributor. But she is baffled by Gov. Jennifer Granholm's failure to choose between bridge projects.
"She says she supports both," she said. "But how do you support one that is clearly illegal?"
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