President Harris Just Gave One Hell of a Speech
I didn’t see that coming. Could be a game changer.
In case you missed what I saw in my mind’s eye, Biden’s replacement just gave a prime time address in front of the U.S. Capitol. All but just a few Congressional Democrats stood on the steps behind her. Here’s a transcript of the speech:
Good evening. I stand before you, along with the Democratic Caucus, to address these troubled times. Rest assured, there is hope.
We would do well to reflect on our history. Throughout much of the 20th century, the United States was on an upward trajectory.
After nearly a century, the suffrage movement gained the right to vote for women with ratification of the 19th amendment in 1920. It’s worth remembering there are still people alive today who knew a time when women couldn’t vote. Of course, many women of color continued to be disenfranchised long after the 19th amendment became law. And voter suppression efforts continue to this day.
It was also a hundred years ago that we saw a burgeoning gay rights movement. Our two-spirit and LGBTQ brothers and sisters continue the struggle in 2024. All of us, as your representatives, have a responsibility to exemplify solidarity through action, through the power of legislation.
In response to the Great Depression, FDR’s New Deal produced massively beneficial public works projects, jobs, desperately needed financial reform, safety regulations and more. It did not, however, produce a universal healthcare system, in large part because of a refusal to integrate medical facilities and medical schools. A crystal clear example of how everyone is harmed by racism.
A single-payer healthcare system, like that which exists in so many other countries, is both more humane and more economical than our current system, which gives lie to those who falsely claim they’re concerned with the deficit, with efficiency, with people who are one catastrophic illness away from poverty.
Labor unions fought for improvements in working conditions and wages. Unfortunately, labor union membership peaked way back in the 1950s. We must reinvigorate collective action and worker power.
Still, the economy is in a much stronger position than it was when Donald Trump was president. As Trump himself said back before he adopted a phony populist persona and was still willing to tell the truth on occasion, “The economy does better under the Democrats.” Thank you, Donald. We agree.
Now, that said, we have a long way to go. We understand that a rising GDP, a deeply flawed metric to be sure, doesn’t always translate to helping you pay the bills, to helping you put fuel in your car or your belly. We hear you and we empathize. More than that, we vow right here and now to raise wages, revive the labor movement, and close the obscenely large wealth gap.
Continuing along our historical timeline, we come to the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. A movement that raised the consciousness of the nation and led to the overturning of laws that allowed forced segregation. The movement also led to passage of the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act.
LBJ’s coinciding Great Society brought us Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, anti-poverty programs for both urban and rural populations, transportation safety standards, and more. Republicans and those behind Project 2025 hope to strip all that away.
I’d be remiss to not mention that the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow still lingers, and systemic injustices continue. But the moral arc was being bent toward justice.
Today, however, the United States is in crisis. I won’t mince words. Fascism and authoritarianism are lurking. There are those who despise democracy, who despise social and economic progress. Faux populists within the Republican Party threaten to further divide the working class, eliminate reproductive health care, foment and exploit hatred, expand the aforementioned wealth gap, and convert civil servants with subject-matter expertise into political lackeys. What’s known as the administrative state is designed to speak truth to power, not simply do the president’s bidding.
Speaking of doing the president’s bidding, shame on the United States Supreme Court. Shame on reactionary justices abusing their power. Shame on reactionary politicians exploiting an increasingly anti-majoritarian political system to defy the will of the people. And shame on them for ignoring precedent.
The president, myself included, is not and must never be considered to be above the law. The justices who have committed impeachable offenses are also not above the law, and they will be held accountable. I want to thank Representative Ocasio-Cortez for bringing forth articles of impeachment against Justices Thomas and Alito.
Hypocritical politicians who are supposedly against big government are working to concentrate power by creating an omnipotent executive branch. They do so with the help of a renegade Supreme Court brought to you by the Federalist Society and dark money. These aspiring fascists are also hellbent not on ensuring religious freedom but on destroying it through the establishment of theocracy.
The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is the stuff of nightmares, and more than 140 people involved in the project worked for Donald Trump, who claims he doesn’t know who is behind the project. Even by Trumpian standards, that’s a whopper of a lie.
Now, it’s no secret that moneyed interests have always had far too much influence on public policy or the lack thereof. In 1935, General Smedley Butler — the most decorated soldier in our nation’s history at the time — stated, “I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism.”
20th century progress was met with disdain by those who had come to expect government by and for the wealthy. A document written in 1971 known as the Powell Memorandum inspired corporations and wealthy individuals to start engaging in what amounts to legalized bribery, filling the campaign coffers of members from both major parties. The memo was taken to heart. There was an incredible expansion in the number of lobbyists, and the amount of money being given to political candidates. Corporations started opening public affairs offices all throughout Washington, D.C.
That system of legalized bribery has metastasized into a cancer on the body politic. The phenomenon of dark money has a stranglehold on those who are supposed to represent we the people.
It was not long ago that the late, conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia warned, “Requiring people to stand up in public for their political acts fosters civic courage, without which democracy is doomed. For my part, I do not look forward to a society which, thanks to the Supreme Court, campaigns anonymously . . . hidden from public scrutiny and protected from the accountability of criticism.” End quote.
A decade later, in defense of dark money, the Roberts Court made the absurd argument that disclosing the identity of megadonors is akin to the state of Alabama disclosing NAACP membership in 1958. It would be laughable if it wasn’t so destructive. Six of today’s Supreme Court justices are not best described as conservative, nor are they responsible interpreters of the law. Rather, they are activists serving right wing extremism and corrupt moneyed interests.
Even before the Supreme Court became the embarrassment that it is today, however, we never truly had government by and for the people. We’ve had government by and for Big Banks, Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Agriculture, the military industrial complex, the prison industrial complex and other greedy entities. This has enabled the commodification of nature, of life’s essentials. It has enabled free market mythology and the false notion that economics is a science akin to physics or chemistry.
Government by and for the wealthy, otherwise known as plutocracy, has cynically fostered the idea that humans are purely self-interested and not wired for cooperation, which history has proven to be every bit as false as trickle-down economics. We are all individuals, but we are also interdependent. We are part of a global ecosystem. And we are the product of cultural and historical inheritance.
Certain billionaires would have you believe they are self-made, while hoping you don’t notice how many of your tax dollars fund their pet projects, or how dependent they are on public infrastructure. The next time Elon Musk tells you he’s against government subsidies, you might remind him that his businesses have received billions of dollars in, you guessed it, government subsidies. And Musk is far from alone.
Those in power say our hands are tied, that now is not the time for anything radical. You have probably noticed that it’s always “not the time.” Bad faith actors performing political theater keep giving the same line of bull. Politicians with the help of corporate backers and a corporate media have manufactured a particular social environment, and then point to that environment as a reason for not pursuing fundamental, systemic change.
It has long been the case that public policy does not reflect public opinion, because far too many of us are answering to those who oppose public preference. To say nothing of opposing the overwhelming scientific consensus on how to deal with climate change, arguably the most pressing issue of our time.
And here is where I must offer up a mea culpa, and a promise to do better.
See, it isn’t just Republicans who have been beholden to moneyed interests. Greedy puppet masters have been pulling all of our strings. Well, in recent days, I’ve met with all of my Democratic colleagues, and we’ve agreed to cut those ties. We will no longer allow for legislation to be dictated by or written by those who only wish to enrich themselves at your expense. We will once again be the party of the working class.
We will bridge the rural-urban divide by rebuilding labor unions, by ensuring that everyone has a living wage, and by investing in green jobs. And we will continue the progress in improving our public infrastructure. We will ensure that anyone who wants to attend college or a trade school is able to do so. We will strive to ensure that nobody goes hungry, and that everyone has access to affordable healthcare. And, yes, we can pay for those things and more if we shift our priorities, if we undergo Dr. King’s “radical revolution of values.”
Campaign finance reform is, as of right here and right now, officially a top priority of the Democratic Party, and we hope the Republican Party will join us in that. Furthermore, it is a disgrace that the halls of power are filled with millionaires. In the coming months and years, we will be investing heavily in grassroots campaigns and mentorship programs geared toward helping working class, everyday Americans become elected officials.
We are also in discussions about what’s known as sortition, or a rotation of citizens’ assemblies, as well as how to implement participatory budgeting. The intent is to give everyone a seat at the table, a voice in governance. And I do mean everyone, regardless of where you live, regardless of who you vote for.
Transforming plutocracy into a genuine democracy will not be easy and we will face intense opposition. To be perfectly honest, it will require organization on a mass scale. It may require general strikes. It will certainly require persistence and thinking outside the box. We can’t do this alone. If our government is to be a government by and for the people, the people must get involved.
All of us up here will be in regular communication with grassroots organizations in our districts and states in an effort to build a nonviolent resistance movement. Organizers must commit to nonviolence, and they will receive a living wage for their work. I can’t stress enough that corrupt moneyed interests will not like these changes, and they will attempt to thwart the movement. But we are determined and we will transform this nation.
In addition to striving for economic justice, we will not shy away from social justice. In fact, social and economic justice are inseparable. They are intertwined. Equity is not a zero-sum game. Acknowledging the realities of race-based or gender-based inequity is dismissed as “identity politics.” But facing reality and ending oppression is justice. It’s fairness. It’s the morally right thing to do. And ending the oppression of some does not equate to oppressing others. Quite the opposite, in fact. To quote Dr. King once more, “A threat to justice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
This may seem paradoxical, but the provision of relative privilege is a means of oppression. What W.E.B. Du Bois called the “psychological wage,” or being made to feel superior based on this or that identity, doesn’t amount to much when you still can’t make ends meet.
To quote James Baldwin, “We’ve yet to understand that if I’m starving, you’re in danger.” And, make no mistake, divide and conquer tactics are as malicious as they are intentional. People have been made to feel superior based on a lie, based on a construct, as a means to keep them from realizing there’s still a boot on their neck, too.
Allow me to get real blunt for a moment. If you’re a white, heterosexual working class man in rural Michigan and you think you have less in common with a black, transgender working class woman in Seattle than you do with Donald Trump — he of the 400-plus million dollar inheritance from his father, he of the gold toilet, he of the multiple bankruptcies, he of the 34 felony convictions, he of the fake university — then I’m going to suggest your priorities are out of whack. I’m going to suggest you’ve been victimized by some of those bad faith actors I mentioned earlier. Don’t be a victim any longer. Allow us to help get that boot off your neck, so that all of us are not just surviving but thriving.
Whether urban or rural, whether poor or working class, whether young or old, you are not wrong to feel like the system has failed you. Because it has. Those of us in elected office have a responsibility to change that, and we will.
We’ve also failed immigrants seeking safe harbor and opportunity, even though the United States truly is a nation of immigrants. No human being is illegal. And we must acknowledge that US foreign policy and trade policy are often drivers of migration.
Contrary to what some would have you believe, immigrants on average commit fewer crimes than US-born persons. Not more. One of the other lies uttered by Donald Trump is that immigrants are a drain on programs such as Social Security and Medicare. That is completely false. In fact, many immigrants, whether documented or not, are paying into those programs without receiving any of the benefits. I have no doubt Trump and Republicans in Congress know that. But they foment and exploit ignorance for personal gain, promoting vicious lies so as to divide and conquer.
We will create a path to citizenship.
The United States is said to be a nation that strives to achieve justice for all. Your elected officials are duty-bound to honor that promise. I’m firmly committed to the realization of that promise, as are all of the Representatives and Senators you see behind me.
Giving tax cuts to billionaires while cutting free and reduced-price school lunch programs is unacceptable. Eliminating the Environmental Protection Agency while increasing fossil fuel subsidies is unacceptable. Privatizing Social Security, Medicare and public infrastructure is unacceptable. Turning a blind eye to brutality and oppression is unacceptable. We would welcome our Republican colleagues to join us in transforming this nation into one that genuinely reflects its purported values, but they must be willing to throw off the chains of plutocracy and disavow a toxic ideology.
In closing, we ask that you vote in November and give us the opportunity to right wrongs, to see that this nation of ours realizes the values of equity and justice for all.
Thank you, and good night.
