Audio: Rep. Jennifer McClellan (D-VA04) Holds Telephone Town Hall with 10,000 Concerned Citizens, Says “We have seen an unprecedented attempt to really take away powers of Congress.”

See below for the audio of last night’s telephone townhall with Rep. Jennifer McClellan (D-VA04) and 10,000 concerned citizens. Here’s her intro:

“Every day since January 20th,  we have seen a flurry of executive actions from the president at a breakneck pace. On Inauguration Day, he took over a hundred executive actions that really began to implement Project 2025. And many of the things that he has done were directly spelled out in Project 2025, from the assault on our federal workforce and an attempt to not only shrink it, but as Russell Vought – who was the architect of Project 2025 and who was just sworn in as the Director of the Office of Management and Budget – you know, he said that the goal was to traumatize the federal workforce, to make them villains and to make them not want to come to work.

And based on the calls and feedback that I am getting from a lot of federal workers – you know, Virginia has one of the largest populations of federal workers, over 140,000 civilian federal workers, many of whom are right in the fourth district – a lot of them are are frankly feeling traumatized. And we saw many of these actions, I don’t know whether they were well thought through, I don’t know whether it was just a matter of causing chaos, but they definitely have caused chaos – from the federal hiring freeze that caused…the V.A. Hospital have to rescind job offers and really put in question whether they could open a brand new facility in Fredericksburg that would be largest facility in the country addressing the health care needs of our veterans. To then an attempted freeze of federal funding dispersements for all grants, and that affected everything from funding to community health centers and we have three in the district that had to close their doors because they could not access their funding and pay their staff. We saw Head Start facilities not be able to get their funding or parents not be able to get their child care subsidies and they didn’t know if they could send their kids to child care. We have seen freeze on funding for NIH funding for our research institutions, including VCU, that has put in question whether they will be able to conduct some of their clinical trials dealing with cancer treatments.

We have seen an unprecedented attempt to really take away powers of Congress. And I think part of that is because even though the Republicans now have a trifecta – in control of the White House, the House and the Senate – it is a very slim margin. In the House, it is a three-seat margin. And we saw in 118th Congress that with a 5-seat margin, Republicans cannot always agree among themselves to get anything done. And so the Trump Administration is really testing the bounds of their authority under the Constitution. But there’s one thing that is clear: the Constitution gives Congress the power of the purse. Congress decides what money is spent on what. And it is not up to the President to decide that he’s just not gonna spend it. That fight was fought under the Nixon Administration and the Supreme Court made clear that Congress has the power of the purse and there was legislation passed at the time to make make that even clearer.

There’s so much going on and we we only have an hour and I want to make sure that I get to your questions. But the first thing I want you to know is we receive hundreds of calls a day. We hear all of them. I get a report every day of what people are calling in. I get a report at the end of the week, what people are calling in, about everything from expressing your opinion about what’s happening to those of you that are calling needing help accessing services. So my team has been working non-stop to address your concerns, to address any of the problems that that you’re facing. So before we go to questions, just a couple of reminders: if you are having a problem with a federal agency, whether you can’t access the Social Security website to make changes, you’re missing a check from the Social Security agency, can’t get your V.A. benefits, passport issues…any federal agency issue, you can call my offices or visit the website mcclellan.house.gov to open a case with one of my case workers. Just to tell you how great they are, in just the last month my case workers have already returned over $400,000 to constituents. And last Congress we were just shy of $4 million in constituent savings. So if you have a problems reach out.”

P.S. Also, check out this Q/A: “Can Congress or the president rescind the Emancipation Proclamation and reenact slavery, because I am concerned with the actions of Project 2025 that that is the direction that we’re heading?”/”The 13th Amendment to the Constitution, which was ratified in 1870 abolished slavery. And so  that that cannot happen; I don’t think they would be crazy  enough to try. But what they are trying to do is roll back all of the progress that we have made under the  Civil Rights Movement to enforce the 14th Amendment, which ensures there would be no discrimination on the basis of race. And you know we are going to fight like hell to make sure that we don’t go back to Jim Crow days…”