Giving Voice to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Principles
Floor Speech
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Mr. RASKIN. Mr. Speaker, I thank our floor leader here on our Special Order hour, Congressman Jackson, for being such an extraordinary leader for all of us in keeping the movement for civil rights, for civil liberties, and for democracy going in the country.
I want to start by just saluting Congressman Jackson for bringing national focus to the assault on DEI, which, of course, has been primarily just a system for opening up the doors to institutions that have discriminated in the past.
I am seeing two kinds of people or, I should say, two kinds of categories of people working in the government under the Trump administration.
One is what they call DEI hires. Who are some of the DEI hires? Well, when Secretary Hegseth became the Secretary of Defense, which he would later rename Secretary of War, he launched a campaign against so-called wokeness in the military, and one of the first people who he fired was the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General CQ Brown, only the second African American to serve in that capacity.
Now, what were his qualifications? Well, he was a U.S. Air Force general and a command pilot with more than 3,100 flying hours, primarily in the F-16 Fighting Falcon. He logged more than 130 combat hours in wartime. He was a commander of global operations and was given nothing but superior reviews, but he was profiled as the reviled DEI hire, and they sacked him.
Then, Secretary Hegseth also got rid of a four-star admiral, Lisa Franchetti, who was one of the first women in the U.S. Navy to serve in a combat role and rose steadily through the ranks of the military to become the first woman ever to lead the United States Navy.
Throughout her extraordinary 40-year career, Franchetti commanded at every level of the Navy, including the guided-missile U.S. destroyer USS Ross, Carrier Strike Group 9, and the U.S. 6th Fleet in the Mediterranean.
So here we have two people who are at the very top of their profession, and of course, there were many more periods in American history where they would not have been able to do that because women and African Americans were excluded. They were able to do it in our time, precisely because the armed services opened up their vision and opened up their vista to include women, African Americans, and others who had been traditionally excluded. Yet, they are essentially labeled DEI hires, and that becomes the justification for getting rid of them.
Well, there is another group of people. Take, for example, Secretary Hegseth himself, who was a weekend talk-show cohost who was forced out of the leadership of two different veterans nonprofit organizations before he was named as Secretary of Defense.
Why was he forced out? Well, it turns out that he was reportedly engaged, repeatedly, in financial mismanagement, improper disorderly and drunken misconduct, and he faced repeated accusations of sexual harassment and assault from multiple women, to the point where even his own mother took him to task for these multiple episodes.
Well, here is another one. The Director of the FBI, Kash Patel, who made news this spring because his security team reportedly requested breaching equipment when he was completely unresponsive one morning. He has been spotted chugging beers with the U.S. men's hockey team in their locker room and giving out free personalized bourbon bottles that say ``Kash Patel FBI Director'' on them.
These are the people who were brought in who end up firing all of the so-called DEI hires. I remember when the new administration came back into power and there was a joint session of Congress in this room. The President came and made his big speech about everything they were going to do.
Then, when it all broke up, afterward, somebody went outside and plowed his car into the back and side of a parked police cruiser. It turns out that was the chief of staff to Speaker Mike Johnson, but he was forgiven immediately for what he had done. I am not saying he shouldn't have been, but let's just say generally, and I am not speaking necessarily in terms of legal prosecutions here, but in terms of culture, we have the DEI hires who are being fired by the DUI hires.
There is a frat-boy culture, which is what I am referring to, which dominates within the Trump administration, and those people are sacking, firing, kicking out of their careers people who have done nothing other than to thrive and succeed because the doors of discrimination have been taken down in the past. They, the Trump administration, want to put them back up. They want to reinstate all of the blockades to people's progress.
Let's see fewer DUI hires and more DEI hires and let people succeed on their actual merit.
Mr. Speaker, we have made progress in America when we dismantle the professional chokehold of good old boy networks and race and gender- exclusionary policies adopted by the groups that have dominated forever. There are established networks that thrive on keeping other people out. Let's open the market and government up to merit and hard work.
BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT
Source