Video: Rep. Jennifer McClellan (D-VA04) Says Trump “and his people told us exactly what they were going to do in Project 2025 – and they’re doing it.”

Excellent job by Rep. Jennifer McClellan (D-VA04) on the show “Mornings with Zerlina” – see below for video and highlights, including about how she’s “tired” and “angry,” and we all can acknowledge that, “but do not give up, because if you give up, we are lost.”

• “…one of the things [Trump’s executive order] did was rescind the Equal Employment Opportunity executive order that President Johnson signed in 1965, which also extended non-discriminatory practices to employees of US government contractors. So when you combine the over 200,000 federal employees and contractors that live in Virginia in the name of ending ‘wokeness’, what the president has done is said you can now can be fired for anything really. And it’s very concerning. Even if you look at the purpose of diversity, equity and inclusion programs, they were designed to recognize the fact the federal government workforce should reflect the diversity of the people that it serves, that the Civil Rights Act was not a magic wand that erased 300 years of the impact of slavery and Jim Crow, and that we had to ensure that the federal workforce made all of our employees feel welcome so that we could attract the best and the brightest. And he has now, President Trump has now turned all of that on its head, made it more difficult for us to meet the needs of the American people. And when you combine that with the general hiring freeze, now in my district our VA hospital had a meeting yesterday, concerned about the fact they now have to rescind job offers that they have given to employees to meet the needs of our veterans, the health care needs of our veterans, they cannot now open a new VA hospital in Fredericksburg because of a hiring freeze, and we already aren’t meeting the needs of our veterans. So that’s one concrete example of how these broad orders are impacting people. But they’re going to roll back over 60 years, if not 150 years, of civil rights progress to protect people from discrimination based on who they are.”
• “Well, the president, I mean he straight up lied, because he said, oh I don’t know anything about Project 2025 – he might not have known but he signed it. I mean he did not know that in his pardons – and he admitted this when asked by a reporter – he didn’t know that he pardoned someone convicted of brutally attacking a Capitol police officer. He straight up said, oh I didn’t know; he thought he commuted the sentence. So he and his people told us exactly what they were going to do in Project 2025 – and they’re doing it.”
• “I think there are couple of couple of ways we have to approach it, because this is all-hands-on-deck moment. And we are working with our allied partners to attack this in the courts, because many of these orders – and I think the way they would want to enforce the Comtock Act arguably would be unconstitutional or against federal law. So where we can, we have got to take this fight to the courts. In Congress, though, they proved they could not govern with a five-person majority in the House, let alone a one-person majority. So House Democrats are going to stand united to protect reproductive freedom to protect the American people from the worst impulses of this Administration. And I, now, as the chair of the abortion access task force of the reproductive freedom caucus, will be focused on first uplifting stories, because again when you look at some of the language used and the title of these EOs or or in their explanation of what they’re doing, it sounds fine on its face. But buried in there, for example, in his EO declaring that there are only two genders, a man and a woman, he snuck in personhood, because he defined male and female based at conception. So we have got to be vigilant reading them all. We have got to take our time, because he is trying to overwhelm us with the fire hose effect. But we need to make sure that we are uplifting stories about how these actions are impacting the people that we represent. And when people see how they’re being impacted, they’re not going to be happy about it.”
• “I think there are issues where we can find common ground – the devil’s in the details. And I follow the lead of Hakeem Jeffries. They are going to find out very quickly, because they fight amongst themselves, that with a one-seat majority in the House and they don’t have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, they can’t get anything done on a lot of issues without Democrats voting for them. And if they want Democrats to vote for them, they are going to have to work with Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer. You know, if they want to cut Democrats out of the discussion and completely ignore us and barrel ahead, then they’re not going to get anything done, and I think they’re going to find that out very quickly.”
• “I think we have to remember that the history of America is progress and backlash. And we are in the backlash now. And I’m tired and I’m angry. I am fighting the same fights that my parents, my grandparents, my great-grandparents fought. But what keeps me going are two things: I’m fighting that fight from a position of more strength and power than they could ever have dreamed of, because they didn’t give up; I’m fighting these fights so that my children and my grandchildren don’t have to…I mean, feel what you feel, acknowledge that you’re tired, but do not give up, because if you give up, we are lost. John Lewis said democracy is not a state, it is an act that requires every generation to do its part to build the Beloved Community. If he had given up, if Dr. King had given up, if Shirley Chisolm had given up, we wouldn’t have gotten the progress we’ve gotten. We’ve got to fight to keep it.”