Ayanna Pressley

Congress established your national charter, Congress created the deposit insurance your bank enjoys, Congress stood up the Federal Reserve to be a lender of last resort, and Congress developed the legal framework that governs your bank.

This administration continues to abandon our LGBTQ+ neighbors by removing protections and barricading justice for the most vulnerable while funneling taxpayer dollars into discriminatory organizations.

Elevated rates of PTSD among our LGBTQ children--trauma linked to bullying, familial and religious rejection, higher rates of homelessness.

We have not passed laws like the Equality Act that are absolutely fundamental to ensuring equality for all Americans in this country.

Under the failed leadership of Education Secretary Betsy DeVos, the OCR has abdicated this critically important responsibility.

The Ending PUSHOUT Act, which I introduced, would invest in the Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights.

I just urge my colleagues to pick their heads up and to defend access to the ballot for everyone.

We reject false choices that purport that access to the polls must be bartered between vulnerable and disenfranchised folks.

In 2018 in Georgia, seven polling locations were suddenly closed by Republican lawmakers before the midterm election.

Millions of individuals across the Nation have been arbitrarily and permanently stripped of their right to vote due to involvement in the criminal injustice system.

I serve in this august institution and this committee with colleagues across the aisle who deny science and the climate crisis.

Would more Americans have jobs today if the Fed had not increased rates over the past 3 years?

Could a Federal jobs guarantee succeed where the Federal Reserve has not?

We want prosperity to be widely shared. We need policies to make that happen.

I know, having been raised by a tenants' rights organizer, that activism can be a full-time job.

Thank you, Madam Chairwoman, and I also want to thank the activists in the room who have been organizing for a more responsive Fed.

But again, did the Fed consider how raising rates would disproportionately impact those who were already struggling to secure employment?

I take special claim to the fact that Dr. King and Coretta actually met in Boston.

The March on Washington was actually the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedoms.

40 percent of American households don't have $400 to meet an emergency need.

Exempt income is income that you need for basic necessities--food, medicine, rent--and income that, like Social Security, other forms of pension, public benefits, and certain amounts of wages, are exempt from collectors, because we don't…

Mr. Peterson's research is just one more case study into our continued criminalization of poverty and the weaponization of the legal system against those who are already living on the margins.

I think we eliminated debtors' prisons in something like 1833.

I still hear from folks in my district, Massachusetts 7th, and across the State, about the continued availability and marketing of these predatory loans.

In times of struggle, the options shouldn't be a debt trap interest rate or nothing at all.