Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi
speaker
221 appearances
16 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard May 2025
Congressman Raja Krishnamoorthi’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Your colleague wrote... But to be fair, though, but to be fair, President Trump and Elon Musk just announced that they are closing Social Security offices and... going to ask seniors and people with disabilities to go check in in person at social security offices that they've closed. And in rural areas or really suburban areas, that may be really hard to do.
And then they'll call those social security recipients, quote, fraudsters. and cut off their benefits. That's what they've announced. And Commerce Secretary, who's a billionaire himself, just said on television, oh, if my grandma misses a Social Security check, I think he said my mother-in-law misses a Social Security check, she won't complain. Well, because he's the Commerce Secretary.
Of course, violence is dangerous and wrong, and those who commit it should be held accountable. And there are millions of Americans right now speaking out against their health care being taken away, speaking out against money being taken away from their taxpayer pockets and being handed out in federal contracts.
We should be having the conversation about how is it that Elon Musk, who makes $8 million a day from federal contracts, as you just said, why is he looking for even more contracts? It was just reported he's trying to land a contract with the FAA so that he can get billions of dollars for Starlink out of that.
He was trying to land a huge contract with the State Department until he got caught by the press. We should agree, whether you're a Democratic or a Republican president, you shouldn't be allowed to appoint a billionaire to the government and then for him to look for billions of dollars in contracts for himself.
That's corruption at its finest, and we need a Republican party and a Democratic party that's willing to speak out against that kind of corruption.
Well, I mean, he brought hundreds of millions of dollars to his campaign.
Thanks so much, and I appreciate your viewers for listening.
Elon Musk makes $8 million a day from the federal government. Why are they looking at cutting Medicaid, which serves single moms, people with disabilities, or Social Security, instead of looking at the billions of dollars from the corporate class? It's because those corporations fund those Republican campaigns.
I think that what's important for folks to know at home, again, even if you may disagree with me on this social issue or that one, is that every Republican member of Congress right now is looking to cut Medicaid.
Over 70% of Republican voters are opposed to Medicaid cuts, but the senator from North Dakota you just had on is talking about passing a bill next week to slash Medicaid by over $800 million. I mean, how is that right? How is that representing the working class person in rural America? I don't get it.
Look, I'm the chairman of the Progressive Caucus in Congress. I recognize some of the viewers at home disagree with me on a variety of social issues, but I think we can agree that Republican members of Congress have no business going along with Elon Musk slashing Social Security, destroying Medicaid and Medicare, firing veterans, all to give out tax breaks to billionaires.
That's the message that Bernie Sanders has been consistent about, and I believe that should be the new message of the Democratic Party, which I think could bring some conservatives back into the Democratic Party if we agree
that these programs we all pay for since literally World War II, Social Security, should be expanded and protected, not ransacked by billionaires that want more money for themselves. You should work to be able to keep your money, not to make Elon Musk richer. You should be paying taxes to improve your life, not to make some billionaire buy their 10th jet.
What do you make of all this mess? I got to tell you, our constituents are livid at this point. We're getting tremendous outreach. The main reason being that I'm talking about even people in the middle, people who might have voted for Trump. We're hearing from, for instance, small businesses. We're one of the biggest kind of concentrations of light manufacturing anywhere in the Midwest.
and Illinois's biggest trading partner is Canada. And so we have tremendous number of exports and imports coming across the border. And these businesses are just seeing their prices skyrocket for their inputs. And now that they're having to pay a lot more to build whatever they're building, they can't sell what they're trying to sell either at the prices that they were expecting.
And meanwhile, our farmers met with me on Thursday, farmers from central and southern Illinois and complained about retaliation in the form of tariffs, counter tariffs on their goods. And so they are very upset. And then you have just residents, everyday people who are paying 27% more for eggs at the grocery store, a lot more for groceries in general.
I had the president of the local 881 of United Food and Commercial Workers as my guest for the State of the Union. He reported that for his 35,000 workers, many of them cannot afford the groceries that they are stocking on the shelves of their grocery stores. And so this is just a complete mess. And it's why, as you saw, Trump's unfavorability is skyrocketing.
Well, I should tell you that my district is also home to one of the biggest concentrations of Ukrainian Americans, and for that matter, Eastern European Americans of any congressional district. These people are beside themselves because they see that we are basically taking the side of a dictator. communist dictator, basically, in the form of Vladimir Putin.
They're not technically a communist country, but they just act like it. And we are disfavoring a freedom-loving democracy in the form of Ukraine. And they are beside themselves about that. And then they see that
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