2020 State of the Union: Rep. Ayanna Pressley calls for President Trump’s ‘eviction’ in Working Families Party response

A night before President Donald Trump looked to be acquitted on impeachment charges of abuse of power and obstructing Congress, U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts’s 7th District said a powerful grassroots movement was underway to “evict the occupant of the White House."

Pressley, the first African American woman representing Massachusetts in Congress, said she’s seen first-hand the effects of “racist, xenophobic" policies from an administration that “emboldens white nationalism and promotes bigotry.”

She said she visited a border detention center where detainees were poorly cared for, and she cited a hearing with Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson, who “refused to say out loud” that housing was a human right.

“I see right through (Donald Trump),” said Pressley, who boycotted the annual speech before both houses of Congress on Tuesday. “The American people see right through him.”

But she added that defeating Trump, who touted American economic prowess in his speech, was not enough, and called on progressives to join forces and find ways to forge progress. She said she learned from her mother, an organizer, who said, “When we organize, we are powerful.”

Pressley said working in partnership with political parties, organizers and communities, progressive lawmakers would advance a Green New Deal “that will transform our economy while addressing head on the affects of climate change;" support organized labor by making it easier to join a union and provide greater protections to workers; bump the minimum wage to $15 an hour; and welcome and defend immigrants, not demonize and deport them.

Other Massachusetts Democrats and liberal groups weighed in after the speech as well.

Carol Rose, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts, said the “real state of the union” was that the federal government has “enacted the cruelest policies in modern American history.”

“Nearly 60,000 people seeking refuge in our country have been forcibly sent to dangerous border cities in northern Mexico,” Rose wrote. “Over 200 abortion opponents in Congress, emboldened by this administration, have asked the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade entirely. And, President Trump has renewed calls for voter ID laws--policies that already disenfranchise tens of thousands of people in 36 states.”

Sen. Ed Markey, who’s up for re-election against U.S. Rep. Joe Kennedy, said the president’s address was “lie-laden.”

“What he didn’t say – gun safety, climate change, clean energy, diplomacy, equal justice, reproductive rights, asylum,” mattered more than what he said, Markey argued.

Kennedy, who delivered the response to Trump’s state of the union two years ago in Fall River, argued the Trump administration “has never judged its own success by the success of our neighbors, it has only sought to consolidate power at the expense of those it silences.”

“From climate change to health care to civil rights to economic justice to gun violence to democratic reforms, we have fought for all Americans regardless of the color of their skin, the god of their prayers or the votes they cast,” Kennedy said.

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