March 5, 2025 Publisher
Remarks of Congresswoman Lateefah Simon as delivered:
Good evening.
My name is Lateefah Simon, Congresswoman for California’s 12th Congressional District in the East Bay. My district covers Oakland, Alameda, Berkeley, and Emeryville.
It’s the home of the Black Panther Party, the home of political courage. And it’s the home of 21st-century technology companies and life-saving medical innovation. If you traveled through my district, you’ll hear people speaking over 150 languages.
My predecessor, Barbara Lee, is a mentor and a trailblazer.
This is the district that sent me to Congress, and I’m honored to serve as a fellow Working Families Democrat.
We are the party for working people in this country, from every background—from every background. We come together with a simple belief that government should be run by and serve the people, not just the privileged and the wealthy. And when I look at what has been happening in our government today, this mission has never felt more urgent.
Each year, the Working Families Party selects one leader to respond to the president’s address. And tonight, I am honored to be that voice to offer our response to the President’s actions over the last few weeks.
But no matter what he says tonight, we’ve already seen and heard enough.
I have only been in Congress for two months. But let me tell you, I’m already alarmed—I’m clearly dismayed—about what’s been happening here in Washington, D.C., where the people’s health—our health care—our education, the lives of real people, are being treated as numbers.
Every family, every child, every senior, every worker, every veteran has a life that matters. And they have people that love them.
You know, my story is not a typical Congressional story. And I’ve experienced so much of what other families, many families in this country, are struggling with today.
I was born in San Francisco to a mother who escaped the Jim Crow South in search of a better life. I was born premature and was visually impaired at birth. I’ve never driven a car. I can’t drive a car, like many disabled people, and I rely on public transportation to get around.
The first office that I ran for was for my local transit board of directors, the BART board, so that I could fight to ensure that everyone had access to affordable and safe and decent public transportation.
Growing up, I was in and out of school and I was in and out of trouble. I became a mom as a teenager and saw how government wasn’t actually working for folks like me. And I knew that we all deserve better.
I found myself—I found my work, my calling, my love for community organizing and being on the ground with folks who deserved more. I began to lead an organization called the Young Women’s Freedom Center as a teenager where, together with other sisters, we helped other young women who were struggling on the streets and in poverty and through addiction to not only get jobs, but to also build their own power and leadership.
I brought this model to the San Francisco’s District Attorney’s office, helping young people charged with low-level offenses get jobs, get education, and get their lives back on track and out of the criminal justice system.
I got hooked there on this idea that if we bring people together, especially those closest to the struggle, we can make our government work for all working people.
In 2012, my husband was diagnosed with a terminal cancer. An aggressive and rare leukemia that forever changed my family. Our physicians told us that he only had months to live.
So we did everything, everything—we had a new baby—to get him treatment, including enrolling him in clinical trials. And it got us two more years. In those years, my daughter remembers her father’s face. She remembers us struggling through treatment.
And you know, you cannot fight cancer on a budget. Those years of health care bills and traveling for treatment and child care bills during his illness—they devastated us and left us with nothing but community.
As many Americans know, a severe illness, a cancer diagnosis can mean a financial disaster as well as deep and profound personal tragedy.
Last month, as a member of Congress, I visited the UC Berkeley labs where they are literally moving through life-saving research, holding clinical trials for diseases like dementia and ALS, terminal cancers, and sickle cell anemia. They are close to real cures for real families.
And in that visit, it was also clear that the Trump administration is moving a tax forward to cut funding for this very research that will prevent these scientists and these student learners, who are also in that lab, from finding real cures.
This will have devastating impacts on families and will leave children without mothers and fathers. This is not hyperbole. This is fact.
My story is also why I believe that everyone should have health care. And I’m fighting with every fiber of my body to make sure that there is a loud voice fighting against these devastating cuts to Medicaid and Medicare that Republicans are trying to move through Congress right now.
My life’s work has been about making sure that all of us, that everyday people, don’t fall through what we know are huge cracks in society.
And that when they do, when and if they do fall through those cracks, we collectively reach down and we help them up.
That’s why I ran for Congress.
Every American story is unique. But I know that many of us are facing a similar challenge.
I know what it is like to rely on SNAP benefits. I did, as a teen mother. I had to put groceries back oftentimes at the grocery store while I was attending community college and working two jobs. I know what that is like.
I know what it is like to rely on Social Security benefits. Trying to get a death benefit after my husband passed away in his early 40s. I know, I’ve been there.
I want better for all of us. I want our government to work for us. Our government throughout the years, especially now, it doesn’t feel like it. It doesn’t feel like it’s serving working families.
But we all know that there are folks in our communities, particularly young folks in our communities, who want to go to college and universities. And they get this big opportunity for better and they want to take care and bring their families along with them in that success. But they know that they can’t pay that high tuition.
We all know that there are folks in our communities who want to stop paying their landlord, and want to buy their first home. But the interest rates and that down payment, it’s just too high.
I want this. We want this. We want that American dream.
We all know that there are mothers who can’t work the jobs that they’ve received, that they’ve worked hard for, or get more hours because they can’t afford the high cost of childcare.
Everything from eggs to the rent, to life-saving prescriptions, it’s getting more expensive. Day by day by day. But corporate profits are soaring.
This is the pain of real working people. We’re feeling it.
But let’s be real. Donald Trump Elon Musk and others have never had to put groceries back at the grocery store. They’ve never had to struggle to put food on the table or save up literally to make rent every month.
They’re lying to us when they say that they want to lower costs to help Americans. They don’t care.
They’ve gotten rich off of cutting corners cheating workers and squeezing our communities for their own tax breaks.
Now they’re pulling the same scam, but on a higher level, a bigger level. They are cheating Americans out of a functioning government and injecting real chaos—real chaos in everyday people’s lives.
And if they’re willing to cut cancer research—I got to tell you—if they’re willing to cut consumer protections, if they’re willing to fire our air safety workers, what do you think that they’re going to do to our public schools? Our VA hospitals? Our Social Security benefits that you paid into?
I’ll tell you what’s coming next. I’ll tell you what’s around the corner:
School classrooms with 60 kindergartners.
Veterans and children and working families without access to the most basic of health care provisions.
Working people into their 70s and 80s without a hope of retirement that they paid into their whole lives.
Job losses that force real people—we’ve already seen it—20,000 federal workers have been fired. These folks will be forced into poverty, potentially shuttering into homelessness.
A sicker and poorer America.
What Republicans want most for themselves: bigger tax cuts for the wealthy, the richest among us. And they want us to pay for those tax cuts.
We work too hard for our children to succeed, we work too hard to take care of our elders, to give it all up now.
The fight that we are in, it’s not left versus right. It’s not blue state versus red state. This is the fight of regular folk against the ultra-wealthy.
When they talk about immigration, gender, diversity, equity, accessibility, and inclusion, you know, they’re trying to make us blame one another. But diversity isn’t the reason why families can’t afford housing. And immigration is not the reason why you are paying more for your prescription drugs. Billionaires and CEOs who don’t care about you are.
Trump campaigned every day on lowering prices for all of us. But he’s already admitted that he doesn’t know how to—or he doesn’t care.
So we’re going to build. We’re going to build. We’re going to build our folks together—from every background—and we’re going to fight back. Because working families have more in common with one another than we have differences.
And when I say “working people,” I am talking about our nurses, our home health care aides, our teachers, our warehouse workers, our waiters. People like the ones that grew up with me and my mama on our block, in our neighborhood in the Bay Area. Folks who are just trying to make every day a little bit better for themselves and their families.
Working people live in big cities, small towns, and in urban areas. But we all live in a system that has left too many behind.
And it’s in that end that we want the same things. We want a job. Everyone wants a job that pays them enough to pay the bills, and the rent, and to put food on the table.
We want housing, quality housing that we can afford, health care when we need it. And a chance, honestly, to leave something better for the next generation.
The common sense idea behind the Working Families Party is that working people should be calling the shots in this country.
And if you don’t like what’s happening—and a lot of us don’t—you have the power to change it. If everyone on your block voted for a government that we deserve, we could change this whole thing.
We can elect everyday folks to lead our school boards and our state legislatures. We can do that.
We can bring these folks, the smartest and the best among us in our communities, to Congress and even the White House. We can get there.
But that starts with rejecting every bit of Trump’s agenda.
We also need to build a government that lives up to our highest ideals, our values, and our collective values of Americans.
So let’s make health care a human right.
We can protect reproductive freedom and abortion rights.
We can make every public school a great school.
We can build affordable housing and make homeownership an attainable reality.
We can and we will raise the minimum wage so that you can work one job to at least $15 an hour. We can do that.
We can make it easier for people to unionize so that workers can get fair treatment.
We can pass a federal jobs guarantee so that everyone who can work will work and has work.
We can reform our broken immigration system and give families a true pathway to citizenship.
We can get money out of politics so that it’s you, voters, and not big donors who drive our electoral politics. You could be in the driver’s seat.
We can stop utility companies from price-gouging families and stop subsidizing dirty energy.
We will stand on a foreign policy that prioritizes the best of us. That prioritizes peace and diplomacy, and not bullets and bombs.
We can ban stock trading from sitting Members of Congress like myself and restore people’s faith in elected officials because they will come from our communities.
And let’s be very clear. We must support and lift up our small businesses. Those mom-and-pop shops are the backbone of this nation. They should and must thrive.
We can take government and make it work for us—if we roll up our sleeves. And we can do that and do this together.
Year after year, the number of WFP Democrats here in Congress has grown. In offices and states across the country, we have shown what is possible when Working Families Democrats take office.
We have raised the minimum wage for millions of workers. And we have fought and won for sick and family leave.
We have stopped people from being evicted from their homes. We have built more affordable housing in our communities.
We have strengthened democracy and given people real choice at the ballot box.
So how do you help? I have a few ideas.
And one, you should think about joining the Working Families Party so that we can help elect working-class people right there in your community.
Or maybe you want to run for office yourself. It sounds like a big leap, but it is possible.
The Working Families Party provides working class candidates around this great country with training and a lot of support.
Now I’m an organizer at heart, and as an organizer, I know that if I’m in the room with people who agree with me 90% of the time, then I know I need a bigger room.
Let’s create a bigger room. Let’s build that room, and let’s create a nation that finally works for all of us.
Thank you and good night.
