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.

I thank my dear friend and sister in service, Representative Tlaib, for cohosting this special session with me this evening to discuss the critical issue of reproductive justice in our country. As chair of the Abortion Rights and Access…

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.

The great poet and pioneer of righteous rage, Audre Lorde, once said: ``I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own.'' The year is now 2020, and here we women are, still in so many ways…

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.

Today I rise in solidarity with my union brothers and sisters in support of the Protecting the Right to Organize Act. Over the last few decades, we have seen the right to unionize, to ban together, and to fight for the collective rights…

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.