Rep. Sean Casten

And a good friend of mine, Katie McGinty, who had been the head of the Council of Environmental Quality in the Clinton White House, she said, I'm not going to encourage you to run, but I will tell you that this is, if you know what you want to have written on your tombstone about what you contributed to the earth during your time on it, there's no better job than being a member of Congress.

And if you don't know what you want written on your tombstone, there's no worse job.

because you have such enormous levers that you can pull on.

And so, you know, in my private sector life, we deployed a couple hundred million dollars worth of capital projects, made some money for various investors.

It looks good on a resume.

My first year in Congress got a billion dollars of legislation passed specifically to deploy clean energy technologies.

Not that things are measured in dollars, but this was a freshman member of Congress and moving in different ways.

And the part of it that I think is sort of beautiful and inspiring is that I flipped a seat that had been Republican for 50 years.

There were 40 of us in that class of 18 who flipped seats.

Of the 40 of us, Jennifer Wexton, Ben McAdams, and Anthony Brindisi had held prior elected office.

The other 37 had never held any elected office before coming in.

You know, me and Dean Phillips had been CEOs.

Lauren Underwood was the nurse.

Alyssa and Abigail were spies.

Tom Malinowski and Andy Kim were in the State Department.

Johanna Hayes was a teacher.

You had all of these people who, you know, the single greatest thing that Donald Trump has ever done is he made people feel like they wanted to contribute to society.

And yes, I think everything that you say to criticize Congress is fair.

I think it goes back way more than 20 years.

Our founders created a Congress that was the Article I branch.