Stop Project 2025

Floor Speech

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Ms. PLASKETT. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman from California (Mr. Huffman) for yielding and for convening us here. I also thank the gentleman for not being swayed by the rhetoric that is happening outside, that is pulling people's attention away from this dire threat to our democracy that is Project 2025.

This is, in fact, a blueprint, as the gentleman has said and so many others have said, to the culmination of years of planning by Washington, D.C.'s, shadiest conservative groups, shadiest individuals, to upend the structures, institutions, and, indeed, the basic rights that actually make America great.

Project 2025 is a playbook for Donald Trump's second term and a plan for the destruction of America as we know it. Despite flashy headlines printed over American flags and men who give loud speeches about their love of freedom, this plan is, in fact, a destruction of our freedoms.

This is a plan, in many ways, related to the great replacement theory, a means to say that America should be a homogenous society, not recognizing that what makes this country so great is, in fact, not just our diversity, but our willingness to have the tug and pull of different ideas.

I can remember when this House was a place where people compromised, where people negotiated, where we did not think that one was right or the other, that we tried to work together. Those days are long gone, and those of us who want to stick our heads underground and pretend that Project 2025 is not a reality, shame on you.

Many of my colleagues who want to pretend that they don't know what this is, that they haven't read it, just because you haven't read it doesn't mean it is not real.

This is a manifesto to ensure that Donald Trump has the ability to do what he wants to be, which is to be a king, to take away the rights that so many of us have, to restrict free speech in schools, to only allow far-right-approved agendas and curricula, to make sure that schools are a place where children are indoctrinated to one idea, not to many ideas and let parents go back and have discussions with their children about those various ideas and instill in them what they believe is right.

I am a parent of five children. I do not have the fear that my children can hear other ideas because I know what I am putting in them and that that is what they are going to do.

These parents who are afraid of their children hearing about slavery, but also not recognizing that we have moved beyond that and are still moving forward and correcting ourselves are doing a disservice to their children. It will cut title I funding that supports low-income schools and results in budget cuts at over 60 percent of public schools across our country.

Project 2025 and its tenets will eliminate Head Start, a program that currently supports 800,000 children across our country, increasing the number of Americans living in childcare deserts. It will erode our freedoms under the vague guise of making America great.

Yes, because it is a Republican plan, Project 2025 calls for severe cuts to Medicare and Social Security. We can't have a Republican plan without a cut to Social Security and Medicare. Then they hide their hand and pretend that that was not a cut that they wanted.

Project 2025 even calls for the elimination of the National Weather Service, making Americans effectively blind when preparing for potentially disastrous hurricanes and tornadoes. I know the people in my district in the Virgin Islands, and I know even those who were dealing with wildfires in the district of the gentleman from California (Mr. Huffman) need to have this weather service to be able to predict these things.

Republicans know that these ideas are not popular with real people of America. That is why my colleagues on the other side of the aisle are hiding from the facts, obfuscating the truth, distracting the public's attention with wild claims right now to vilify minorities.

That is why the former President and Senators, his running mate, are distracting the media with bigoted, racist tropes about legal immigrants in this country, so that we are not talking about this, Project 2025.

It is a playbook, and it is authored by individuals who worked very closely with Donald Trump in his last administration and want to execute this within 100 days to ensure that he has the full authority.

I am an alumni of the Department of Justice as a political appointee. The idea that the Department of Justice would have to answer to the President is obscene, and we know that the Supreme Court has set the stage for him to be able to do that.

Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman so much for allowing us to illuminate and share just some of the things that are in this playbook for the first 100 days of a Trump administration.

The more we let the cronies and individuals who have run this across without giving light to it and letting Americans know, the more we are likely to lose our democracy.

BREAK IN TRANSCRIPT

Source