Poor People's Campaign

Floor Speech

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Mr. KHANNA. Mr. Speaker, I thank Representative Raskin for his leadership in putting focus on the Poor People's Campaign and his advocacy for so many issues of economic justice and racial justice.

I want to join my colleagues in recognizing the extraordinary moment in this country that the Poor People's Campaign has had under Reverend Barber's leadership. There was a panel that Senator Warren had a few days ago where Reverend Barber was there and ordinary individuals were testifying about their experiences, the people we should be hearing in Congress.

I want to share two quotes, and then share some testimony.

One is what Reverend Barber said, which, in my view, makes him one of the great civil rights leaders in this country. He said:

I would rather join with you and die trying to change the moral direction of this Nation than to live and die and it be written on my epitaph: ``Lived in the time when moral dissent was necessary. And he, and they, said nothing.''

That requires such courage, and it is so believable.

When Dr. Barber was with a number of others at the hearing, they had this chant that before the Poor People's Campaign will fail, they will go to jail. And that sense of civil disobedience for a moral cause is part of the great tradition of our Nation and what has brought change.

I want to thank Reverend Barber for being such a moral leader and everyone who is risking arrest, risking their life for justice.

Now, I am honored to read the testimony of Paul Boden, who is the Western Regional Advocacy Project lead in my home State of California. He writes:

My name is Paul Boden, and I am with the Western Regional Advocacy Project lead. We are based out of California, Colorado, and Oregon with core member groups doing local organizing around poverty and homelessness issues in 10 communities. I am testifying today about the advent of contemporary homelessness in the early 1980s and the connection to neoliberal economics and how that has played out over the past 35 years.

In doing this research, we found that with 2 less attack submarines, 29 less fighter jets, and 2 less combat ships, we would more than triple all of the funding that is currently dedicated to public housing capital investments, public housing maintenance, and all of the Federal homeless programs. Clearly, these spending priorities have nothing to do with security or the need for an investment in our military complex.

As part of the consequence of the advent of homelessness that this kind of approach to governance created, we've spoken to 1,600 homeless communities, and 82 percent of them have reported that they are getting arrested, harassed, and ticketed. And we know the fines-and-fee-games that local governments play. 77 percent of these people are getting that same kind of policing activity for sitting or laying down on a sidewalk. 75 percent for loitering. Sleeping, standing, and sitting are criminal offenses when you are the population that is being targeted by local government for removal from those communities. And this is happening, unfortunately, in communities across the United States.

My research also brought out very clearly and undeniably that these are the same policing programs, these are the same laws, the same racist and classist policing programs that were used with the Anti-Okie laws, with the Sundown towns, with the Japanese-American Exclusion Act, with the ugly laws, and with the Jim Crow laws. The darker your skin color, the greater your disability, the poorer you are, you are way more likely to be a target of these policing programs, and that is the way it has been playing out for years.

We have written legislation and gotten it introduced in California, Oregon, and Colorado. We had introduced it 8 times. We got crushed 8 times. But we are going to keep bringing it back until the final answer is yes. Our law, our legislation would make it illegal for local government to criminalize life-sustaining activities and activities that we all commit: eating, sleeping, sitting, standing still. We all do that. To criminalize doing it is to purposely and maliciously create legislation specifically aimed at enforcement only applying to some people. That is us, all of us.

Paul Boden's words are ones I hope this entire country will hear. And as we are listening to the voices of so many people marching in our streets in Washington, I hope we will take some inspiration from their courage, their courage far exceeding any of ours in this body, and be inspired to do the right thing and fight for economic justice and the policies that they recommend that would help alleviate poverty and help the working poor and poor people across this Nation.

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