Peaceful, Silent Protest

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Mr. GREEN of Texas. Mr. Speaker, and still I rise, and I rise, Mr. Speaker, a liberated, unbought, unbossed, fearless, unafraid Democrat.

I rise, Mr. Speaker, with a special message, one that concerns events that transpired right here on the floor of the House of Representatives last night.

I rise, Mr. Speaker, to speak truth to power and truth about power. To speak truth to power, you have to simply say to power: We have a problem, and let us solve the problem. But if you speak truth about power, you say: Power, there is a problem, and you are it.

I would like to address both. Let's start with the genesis of what occurred last night, and that genesis is a meme in some worlds, but it was actually something that AI concocted. It had President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama being represented as apes, portrayed as apes.

I find this unacceptable, and a good many people of good will found it unacceptable, as well. As a person of good will finding this unacceptable, I wanted to do more than simply tweet something about it or write something about it. I wanted the President to know that people of good will will confront him and let him know that he is doing things that are unacceptable.

It is unacceptable to portray Homo sapiens, especially persons of African ancestry, as apes--a little bit more than, in some worlds, of the ape family and a little bit less than a Homo sapien, something that is sort of in a twilight zone, maybe the missing link, if you will.

We are not the missing link. We are as human as anybody else, and we are going to demand the respect that everybody else is accorded. This is not a world where you are going to relegate some human beings to a lower life form simply because it pleases you and a host of people who you happen to communicate with. This is unacceptable.

So right here, I sat on this row. I was over one seat away from the aisle, but when the President approached, I then approached the aisle. When I approached the aisle, I wanted him to see a sign that I had that simply said--but it was truthful; I believe it was powerful--that Black people are not apes. Black people aren't apes.

I flashed that for the President to see. Based upon the way he turned away and tried to move briskly, it appears that he got the message but did not want to embrace the message.

As a result of this, he made his way up to give his speech, and I continued to stand silently, holding my signage. My signage was my means of silently protesting.

There were other persons over in this area who were protesting, and they were doing it peacefully. They had on signage. It was displayed on a cap--that is what I saw on one person, a cap--and it had language on it.

These kinds of things are done in this Chamber quite regularly. If someone thinks it is too often, I won't differ with them, but we all have to stop. If we are going to stop some of us, every one of us will have to behave in a similar fashion.

I stood there with my signage, and my colleagues became rather disturbed about it. I did not create a disturbance. I stood there silently. They created the disturbance. They are the people who grabbed and ripped my signage. They are the people who said things to me as I traversed the aisle and tried to make my way out of the Chamber. They are the people who became rather rambunctious and behaved, in some ways, in an unacceptable fashion.

If there is to be some concern about who created the disturbance, then you have to look at the video, and you will see.

I am saying this to you because I have heard talk of someone wanting to censure me again. I have already been censured. This happened some time ago, and I have signage that I used to indicate that, while I have been censured, my signage indicates that I have not been silenced, and I will not be silenced, censured but not silenced.

This was when the President was here for a joint session of Congress. The President was indicating that he had a mandate. I wanted him to know that he didn't have a mandate to cut Medicaid, Medicare, or Social Security, and I spoke up.

I was seated in that very same area. For this, I was removed, and I was censured. But for this that occurred last evening, there should not be a censureship of me. If anybody is going to be censured, it should be the people who became so rambunctious as to create a disturbance.

I didn't do that. I silently stood, and I would do it again. The first time I engaged the President, it was with spontaneity. I did not plan this. I responded to this because I was concerned about Medicaid, Medicare, and Social Security, and well I should have been because about $1 trillion has been cut from healthcare.

We are still fighting to get subsidies so that people can pay premiums that they can afford. This is a part of that affordability that the President refuses to recognize, but I did this with a degree of spontaneity. It was not planned.

What I did last night was planned, but it was only planned after I did have a conversation with my staff and asked them to tell me why I should and should not come over. We had that conversation, and I made the decision myself. My staff did not make the decision, but I welcomed their input. I came here to behave, as I did, and engage in peaceful, silent protest--peaceful, silent protest.

However, my colleagues caused it to metamorphose into something that was less than what some persons would call the standards that we have set for ourselves here in the House of Representatives.

I am not going to give a long message today. I wanted to make this message clear such that people would understand that I believe in what I did. The President should not portray persons of African ancestry as apes.

This is unacceptable given the history in this country of caricatures such as this being utilized against people of color at an earlier time. The President would take us back to those ugly days when you could call Black people n-words with impunity, when you could demand that Black people show respect that was not deserved, when the Black people were relegated to the back of the bus. They were relegated to the balcony of the movie and the bottom of the jails.

This is unacceptable. Black people are not going back, Mr. President. Black people are going to move forward with the rest of this country.

I am giving notice today that we will not tolerate this level of injustice emanating from the highest office in this country, from the Presidency. We will not tolerate it, Mr. President.

I speak for a good many people of good will, of all hues, who have decided that they will not tolerate it.

Now, one final word on something else before I bring you to my closing. It seems to me that the news media--a good many, not all the outlets--not all of them, but a good many of these major outlets have decided that they will determine when a problem that African Americans are having to suffer--they will determine when it is worthy of being televised, worthy of when it should be challenged, when the problem itself should be taken on, and they will decide who is going to solve our problems.

If we allow other people who, for whatever reasons, have a timeline that does not coincide with our suffering, then we do ourselves a disservice. We cannot allow some of these major news sources to decide when they will give us the opportunity to protest our problems.

Those who would deny us this opportunity to engage in peaceful protest will only make it possible for other forms of protest to manifest themselves. This peaceful protest is an acceptable methodology by which problems can be brought to the attention of the public, can be properly litigated, and can be resolved, but not when you have a media--and there are many of them that would do this, and I will tell you who they are so that there won't be any question about it. I know that they don't favor me because I talk not only to them but about them.

They are the same people, the same networks, who are over in the Russell Office Building--over in the Russell Office Building, named in honor of a bigot and a racist. Richard Russell was a coauthor of the ``Southern Manifesto.'' Richard Russell fought anti-lynching legislation.

Richard Russell fought civil rights legislation. We should not honor a bigot and a racist by placing his name on a building paid for with taxpayer dollars.

Who are they? They are the people who have themselves stationed above the statute of Richard Russell in the Russell Senate Office Building. They are CNN. They are MSNBC. Yes, they are two of the major components of this group of folks who don't respect us enough to move themselves from the Richard Russell Office Building. Don't leave FOX News out. These are the people who talk as though they are our friends, who give the impression that they want to see our problems solved. Yet, they are part of the problem over in the Russell Senate Office Building. CNN, MSNBC--no longer that--it is MS NOW, and also FOX News, they are a part of the problem.

I speak truth not only to power. I told you I would speak truth about power. This is about them, and this is about what they are doing to prolong the suffering that we have to endure by having Richard Russell's name on the building and having them right there over Richard Russell in the Rotunda dedicated to Richard Russell.

How shameless are you? Why is it that you, who portray yourselves as the bearers of the torch of freedom, as the carriers of the words of ``liberty and justice for all,'' how can you station yourselves in that building all of these years and not make a to-do of it?

You know you have the power to make the change come about. The Senate itself can do it, and you can influence the Senate. But rather than do that, you and the Senate, you are participants in the same coverup of Richard Russell being the racist that he is and having taxpayers pay for his name on a building.

Those are the people that I am talking about, and there are others. I just mentioned these three main characters in a sense because they are the ones that hold themselves out to be such great liberty-seeking people and wanting justice for everybody. Shame on you. You don't want justice for everybody. You just want to make the news for yourselves.

I marvel at how newspeople have decided now that if the story is to be told, they have to make the news too. Just report the news. Tell the truth about what is happening over in the Russell Senate Office Building. These are the people who want to decide when the problems of people of color can be solved and who will have the opportunity to solve them. Until they decide who it is that will have the opportunity to do this, it won't be done. Shame on you. Become the newspeople that you are supposed to be. Don't pick and choose. Just carry the news.

Unfortunately, they have become so interwoven with the various parties that they literally are mouthpieces for one party or another. You are a news source. You are not mouthpieces for any political party, or you shouldn't be. But that is what you have become. Shame on you. Do you have no respect for the profession that you are supposed to represent?

Now, as I come to my final close, sometimes I close more than once-- and I am being handed a note, so let me just see what my note says. So please forgive me.

All right. I shall honor this request.

I am honored to tell you that in my quest, which is not a quixotic quest, I see it as a noble calling. In my quest to bring some scintilla of justice to this cause associated with the President representing a former President and First Lady as persons who are less than Homo sapiens, maybe a little bit above the primates, but still not the human beings that other people happen to be.

In my quest to do this, it has become very clear to me that people of goodwill do not want to see us continue down the path that we are currently traversing. People of goodwill want to see us unite and deal with the great issues of our time.

But you can't deal with the great issues of the time if you have a President who is continually ignoring the norms, ignoring the rules, ignoring the Constitution. When you have a President who has decided that he can go to war at will, without conferring with the Congress. Who would allow a President to speak for 435 people? Who would allow him to have this awesome power to determine for the hundreds of millions of people in this country that we go to war when he says we go to war? This is totally unacceptable, and it is unconstitutional.

The President does not have the authority to unilaterally declare war. He has to consult with the Congress.

Well, there is a reason why he is not consulting. It is because there are too many pusillanimous politicians in Congress, people who have decided that they will bend the knee and kiss the ring. There are people who are afraid to speak not only truth to power but truth about power as well. If you won't speak truth to power, I guess it is farfetched to assume you will speak truth about power; but there are too many.

The President has assumed the responsibility of Congress to declare war. He does it because Congress has been on the sidelines, not by accident, but with intentionality. They have just decided--and when I say Congress, I really mean my Republican colleagues. Democratic colleagues, please understand this does not refer to you.

My Republican colleagues know that I am speaking the truth. They know that the President should not be declaring war without us. Maybe there would be a majority of us who would say yes, let's go to war. Until that happens, we have to assume that there is not a majority of us saying it, and the President cannot assume that he can, on his own volition, just declare war. This is the kind of President that we have.

It is difficult to deal with some of these other issues concerning affordability when you have a President who disrespects the separation of powers. He doesn't believe that courts have the ability to make judicial and judicious decisions. He thinks that if they don't agree with him, they are wrong. If they are wrong, he believes that they can be impeached. It took the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court to remind him that he does not have that level of authority, that he must recognize the Court's authority as a separate branch of the government, the judiciary, and he has to honor the decisions or he can appeal the decisions. It took the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court to influence him--I assume he was influenced by the Chief Justice--to get him to stop flouting court orders. That is what he does. He flouts the orders of courts.

He disrespects Congress' right to declare war. He disrespects the power of the judiciary to make decisions and, if you differ with them, to appeal. He also disrespects the notion that the Constitution provides something called due process, the right to be able to simply raise your hand and say: Hey, you got the wrong guy. I am not the person you are looking for. I am not the person who performed this dastardly deed. That is not me.

He just believes that if he thinks you are it, then you are it. You can be summarily removed from the streets of this country by persons in military regalia, with a mask and little identification, taken to some distant place, locked up. Family and friends don't know where you are because this President believes that you are somehow a criminal that has breached some code of his, not necessarily the law, given the way he understands the law, and you should be taken away.

When you have all of these things happening and then you couple this with the way he demeans people, he stood right there at the podium at the Joint Session of Congress and called Members of Congress lunatics. Well, when he does all of these things, it is difficult to deal with affordability. It is difficult to deal with the housing crisis. It is difficult to deal with what is happening not only in the stock market, which he seems to celebrate and appreciate, but also what is happening in the supermarket.

Most of my constituents are more concerned about the prices in the supermarket than the prices in the stock market. They are concerned about the necessities of life, not their ability to store away something so that they can have a better quality of life by virtue of playing what we call the stock market.

We have a responsibility to address all of these other issues, but this President distracts us from them, and he prevents us from resolving them. As a result of doing this, he is as much to blame for any of these problems associated with affordability as anybody else in this country. In fact, he is more to blame when you realize that the Supreme Court had to tell him that a tariff is a tax. It is a tax on the American people, and that he doesn't have the authority to impose these taxes.

He has got lawyers who are supposed to be advising him if he doesn't know. Most people assume that if you are going to tax something coming into the country, into the hands of a person who is in this country and you put a tax on it--they call it a tariff, but when you put this tariff tax on it, that this person is either going to pay it himself to get the product into the country or the person that is sending it in is going to have to lower the cost or the person bringing it in can pay the cost and then pass it on to the consumer. At some point it becomes something that is passed on to the consumer. That is what has happened.

When you have that coupled with the other things I have mentioned, affordability becomes a difficult issue to negotiate. It is easy if you want to capitulate and call that negotiation, but capitulation is not negotiation. Capitulation means, in the President's world, he has won. He talks about winning. He has won, and you have lost. For him, it is an all-win-or-lose game, and he always has to win.

The President is the source of the upheaval that we are seeing in this country. Two people killed--American citizens, unarmed, were killed under the color of law by the constabulary. Members of our police protection force killed two people. We saw it with our own eyes. We saw what happened to Ms. Good as she was in a vehicle. We saw how she had her life taken from her. We saw what happened to Alex when his life was taken from him, shot 9 or 10 times, depending on who is counting, while he was unarmed, while he was on the ground, while he was subdued to the extent that he was not a threat to anybody.

Yet the President of the United States distracts us with other things, including buying Greenland and taking Canada and making it the 51st State. He goes on to something else. Now we are no longer mourning the lives of those two people that were lost tragically at the hands of the constabulary under the color of law.

These kinds of things are distractions that allow him to get away with other things, that allow his family and himself to make huge sums of money, profits. It allows them, while we are being distracted, to drive the market down, and he will then signal to people over his Truth--well, I don't even like to call it Truth--over his means of transmitting messages--he uses that to tell people: It is time to buy. His people buy, the market goes up, and they make billions.

This is what is happening. I know. I am on the Financial Services Committee. We have had the empirical evidence presented to us.

All of these things--other things are happening while the President is making billions by and through his family, billions of dollars.

We fight among ourselves such that we cannot coordinate and unify and acquire the unity necessary to deal with this reckless, ruthless President. We have to find a way to put a stop on his behavior. His behavior is totally unacceptable.

I am here to tell you that what I did last night, I would do again. I would do it again by coming in and taking my seat and saying to people what I said because what I said was necessary.

It was not performative. It was not to get attention, other than to call attention to what the President is doing. It was not to get attention but to call attention to what the President is doing.

I still say that all of these other things that we find ourselves saddled with, they can be solved, but you have to have a President who is willing to behave with some degree of Presidential dignity, according respect to the people of this country, which he seems to have great difficulty doing. He seems to, for whatever reason, want to believe that his moral standards are the standards that everyone concurs with.

He has as much as said that the only thing that can get in his way would be his own moral standards. How bold. How can a person have the gall to say such a thing? Do you not want to hesitate and have the good sense to say to yourself that maybe this is not an appropriate thing to say?

But I think he believes this. Because he believes it, he imposes it on us, whether we like it or not. Well, Democrats don't like it, and Democrats want to do something about it, but Republicans are in the majority.

If there is a problem with these great issues of our time, don't lay them at the feet of Democrats. Democrats are doing as best as they can with what they have to work with, the resources that are available to them. These resources are not unlimited. We just don't have the same opportunity to bring legislation to the floor that Republicans have. We don't have the opportunity to deny things to get to the floor that Republicans can deny. We are in a weakened position because they have 218 votes or more in the House, and they have more than 51 votes in the Senate. They are in the majority.

When you are in the majority, don't blame President Biden for what you are doing. President Biden is no longer the President of the United States. He should not be blamed for what is happening currently within the United States. This is Donald Trump's watch. We ought to blame Donald Trump and the Republicans who side with him and prevent us from solving the great issues of our time because they have the power.

We have but one power that we can use without the consent of the other side. That one power is impeachment. We have one power: the power to impeach.

We are in a countdown. We are in a countdown because, whether the President likes it or not, whether I like it or not, the people of the country want to see him impeached. Whether he likes it or not or whether I like it or not or anybody else, he is going to be impeached before he leaves office again. He should be for what he has done to the country in terms of its devolution into authoritarianism. He should be impeached.

Mr. President, you will be impeached for your dastardly deeds done and for the way you have demeaned the Presidency, the way you have harmed society with your behavior. You should be impeached.

I say to you: I would, without question, reservation, or hesitation, given the opportunity, bring the Articles of Impeachment to have him at least impeached. I would hope that the Senate would act and remove him from office.

But even if the Senate chooses not to act, we should proceed with our countdown to impeachment and impeach him. It is that impeachment that will make the difference in the lives of the people of this country when the signal is sent that we do not agree with his behavior.

People are waiting for us to let them know that we don't agree, and this is the best way to signal to them we don't agree, with Articles of Impeachment, where we can make our case, explain it to the public, and then take a vote on it and show the public that a majority of the people in the House of Representatives differ.

Someone would say: Why bring impeachment until you have a majority?

It is because we, quite often, build up to a majority by presenting legislation on the floor that doesn't get a majority of votes the first time.

The best example of this is healthcare. It took us almost one century to get the kind of healthcare that we have, so that people who have affordability problems will have healthcare in this country. It took us almost a century to do it, but we kept bringing it back and back until we were able to get a President, a House, and a Senate that could agree on something and get it done.

That is the way it is with impeachment. Somebody has to lay the foundation for it, Mr. Speaker, and when you lay the foundation for it, you are putting the country in a position to move forward with it.

I am assuring you, Mr. President, should you continue with what you are doing, articles will be filed whether they are agreed-upon by a majority or not. We will file the Articles of Impeachment, and we will have votes on them. This is what I believe the Constitution not only allows but requires. This is what I think that the Constitution requires.

Mr. Speaker, I want you to take these last words to heart: I still rise unbought, unbossed, and a liberated Democrat.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source