Keith Ellison: “If the gentleman yields back. Congressman Johnson, you know, we are the progressives. We want progress. And if you say…”

“If the gentleman yields back. Congressman Johnson, you know, we are the progressives. We want progress. And if you say you're a conservative, what, over the past 8 years, do you want to conserve? Do you want to conserve these exploding unemployment rates they've handed us? Do you want to conserve this war in Iraq and Afghanistan? Maybe you want to conserve this regime of deregulation which has allowed businesses, and particularly in the financial sector, to do whatever they want and not have to worry about consumers. Is that what you're trying to conserve? The fact is the people of America don't want conservatism. They want a progressive vision. They're looking at things like I have up on this graph right here. They're looking at Minnesota. We have an unemployment rate in 2008 of 6.9 percent. Last year, 2007, it was 4.7. In California, they're looking at 9.3 percent unemployment this year, 5.9 percent the year before. What about our colleagues from Michigan, Congressman Johnson? We've got a serious problem. The question is if you look at these high unemployment rates, and you look at every blue line is 2007 and every red line is 2008, as you can tell, unemployment is up all across the Nation everywhere. These things did not happen by accident. They are the product of a set of policies, many of which were promulgated right in this gallery you and I are in right now.”