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
What we're doing with Canada, what we're doing with our friends and partners and allies elsewhere means that whether it's Poland or whether it's any other NATO country or for that matter, whether it's South Korea or Japan or anyone else with whom we have treaty alliances can't rely on us. And that drives them insane.
And so we are kind of in this situation where they feel less safe and they're paying higher prices and they're having a harder time doing business and they're worried about their children because we just heard two nights ago that Trump is going to lay off half of the workforce of the Department of Education. Are you kidding me? This is craziness.
And this is the kind of nonsense that they're very, very upset about. And did I mention Doge and Elon Musk? When people found out about Doge and Elon Musk having access to their private computers, identifiable information at first at the Treasury Department, we got like a thousand phone calls in 24 hours.
And, you know, that's just that's just the level of, you know, alarm on the part of people at this point.
well or the greater good do your constituents want pain and suffering and infliction of of harm absolutely not and you know one of the worst things that i heard the other day apparently there's a report that maybe it was howard lutnik or it was scott bessen one of those billionaire cabinet secretaries actually said that we should go into a recession can you believe that
that somehow going into a recession would be a good thing for America. And I was saying to my friends, like we need to, We need to get back to basics here. We need to do whatever we can. We need to have a coalition to prevent recession. I call it CPR.
We need CPR for this economy to prevent us from going into recession and preventing all the collateral damage that's about to happen in the form of unemployment and everything else.
Yeah, so I think it means a few things. First of all, I'm doing a lot of town hall meetings. A lot of them are even pop-up town hall meetings where we find out about an executive order in the morning. And then we say, look, we got to talk about this with our constituents either today or the next day.
And believe it or not, we had like 1,600 people just show up for one of these pop-up town hall meetings because of the level of concern and fear and anger and all of the above. In terms of how do we fight, I think there are a few ways that we have to fight. One, we absolutely have to lift up our voices at this point.
I've mentioned this before, but that means the average person lifting up their voices and connecting with their member of Congress on both sides of the aisle. It means us in Congress using our tools on committees to bring about accountability and transparency. We came within one vote
of successfully subpoenaing uh elon musk and we have to keep doing that we have to get him to testify under oath about what the hell he's doing uh at doge secondly we have to continue with the litigation both inside and outside congress third we have to use our votes and that's very important as you know we do have some leverage we need to use it accordingly and then last
We have to go to our Republican colleagues and we have to say, look, you have choices. You can either harm your constituents by gutting Medicaid, for instance, or you can do the right thing and oppose those moves. If you decide to do the wrong thing, we're going to hold you accountable. And that's going to be at the next elections. It could be in your primaries, whatever. But the point is that
We need to do everything. We need to fight in the court of public opinion. We need to fight in the legal system. And of course, we need to fight in the halls of Congress. We will never surrender. We cannot surrender.
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.
Illinois's biggest trading partner is Canada. We have a tremendous number of exports and imports coming across the border. These businesses are just seeing their prices skyrocket for their inputs. 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.
They are. You know, I think that you might have seen it, but as polls or poll numbers are dipping now, as people are paying attention to what's happening here, you know, some people talk about DEI. I also talk about it, you know, Doge, Elon and incompetence. And it is out of control, my friend. And we're seeing it kind of lay down. wreckage across the government landscape.
My constituents made almost 1,000 phone calls into our office the day that they learned that Elon Musk had access to private information on the Federal Payment Service. They don't want any part of that. And these are Republicans, Democrats, and independents who are calling in. They aren't just Democrats. They aren't just liberals. They are people across the political spectrum.
The more they learn, I think there is buyer's remorse taking hold as well.
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