During a town hall on Tuesday, Rep. Bennie Thompson (D-MS) spoke about the SAVE Act which would require people to provide proof of citizenship to register to vote.
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00:00Now, that's important because there are a lot of people in this district, that's the only check that they get in their household.
00:10So it's not fair to play with folks' livelihood or their future.
00:17And so we're going to do just that.
00:19I'll talk about a couple of other things.
00:20Education is key to me because all of us, I'm a grandfather,
00:26I want my grandchildren to have the best opportunity to be the best that they can be, bar none.
00:36My daughter is jealous of how I treat her children, you know?
00:45They're talking about I couldn't do that when I was their age.
00:50I said, well, if I had known grandchildren was this good, I'd have had them first.
00:57You know?
00:58So it's important that we hold the future for our children.
01:06That means whatever they want to be.
01:09I'm called Paw Paw.
01:11Paw Paw is going to do everything he possibly can to help little Gina, who's 24,
01:18and little Thomas, who's 19.
01:21You know what I'm saying?
01:22But I want to help them just like all of you.
01:25But why would we try to cut out the programs that's going to allow young people to become the best that they can be?
01:33I'm not going to do that.
01:34Education is important.
01:37Workforce training.
01:39Everybody can't finish college.
01:41But you can be a nurse, you can be a carpenter, you can be an electrician.
01:47I had to call a plumber yesterday.
01:50I missed my calling.
01:53I should be a plumber when I got the bill because it's clear they do all right.
02:03You know?
02:06So why can't we help young folk who want to be plumbers and electricians?
02:13You know?
02:14Now, they might want to be barbers, but for me, they'd lose money.
02:20But there's still some folk would have.
02:23But we have to help them.
02:24And so we have workforce training monies that are available.
02:28They're trying to cut, in the budget, workforce training monies out for our young people, too.
02:35Our veterans.
02:37People always say we want to thank them for their service.
02:41But then you look around, they're trying to cut their veterans programs.
02:48They will cut several thousand employees in the VA system.
02:53And that means that when you call that number, and that, God forbid, there's no telling how long you're going to have to wait on hold.
03:06And now they say, oh, don't worry about it.
03:09We're going to set up a system where you can go online and do it that way.
03:16Well, if I live in Cannonsburg, right up the road, guess what?
03:27I'm going to have a tough time having access to the Internet.
03:31Because, you know, just like cell phone service, you know, some places you go, I tell people, look, about a minute, I'm going to have to get off this phone.
03:44It's, oh, I'm not through talking.
03:45I say, that's not the point.
03:47I won't have any service.
03:49You won't hear me.
03:50And so we have those kind of, and we're trying to clear it up.
03:53I'm the only person in the delegation who voted to have Internet to the last house.
04:00I don't think our children should be straddled with trying to learn and not having access to the Internet.
04:07So I voted for it, for that to happen.
04:10And so there are a lot of programs that we've put in place to get to be number one, and now a lot of those programs are at risk.
04:25And so my comment to you tonight, we just passed a budget.
04:33In that budget is an $880 billion cut in Medicaid.
04:41That's going to hurt a lot of folks.
04:45In that budget is reduced monies for our farmers to do their crops.
04:53One person said, well, they said they're just going to pause the program.
05:00Wait now.
05:01If I got a loan at the bank and the program's paused, I can't get the loan.
05:08And so we're struggling with that.
05:12But we have a lot of good federal employees, and we passed out some of the information.
05:20They lost their jobs in some instances because they got promoted.
05:25I could work 20 years, get promoted to a higher-paying job, and because I wasn't in the job a year, I was called a probationary employee.
05:41I didn't get the consideration for the 20 years I had been working.
05:45And I get this e-mail from somebody I don't know telling me you're fired either because you're a probationary or that your job is eliminated or you just didn't measure up.
06:06You said, wait now.
06:07My last evaluation, I got superiors.
06:12So they had to walk that back.
06:15And then people took them to court.
06:18And some of those employees, not all of them, are getting their job back.
06:22But it's so unfortunate because generally when you worked for the government, you were pretty much locked in saying, all I got to do is go to work, do my job, and I can stay here for my whole time.
06:37Not anymore.
06:38Because under this administration, they brought a guy in named Elon Musk who has decided that he's the smartest person on earth.
06:52And what he's going to do, he's going to fix, he's going to fix the problem.
06:58Well, he's caused absolute chaos.
07:03All up and down.
07:04People don't feel good about what's happening.
07:06He says, social security is a Ponzi scheme.
07:15Now, a Ponzi scheme is, you know, like something crooked.
07:23You know, social security is a worthwhile program.
07:30But if your heart's not right and you want to take that money and do something else with it, you've got to convince people it's bad.
07:38So on top of that, he gets access to all your information, you know, your personal information.
07:49And so that means that it has the potential of being shared with somebody else because there are no guideposts.
07:58We had guideposts in the Social Security Administration that this information is protected.
08:04We don't have those guideposts now because the Dodge folk come in, a couple of them 19 years old, some of them 20.
08:16Now, these are the folk who are telling 30, 40, 50-year-old people, you've got to go home.
08:25That's not right.
08:26And that's why we hold town halls, meetings like this, to inform people as to what's going on.
08:35And the worst thing is, you know, our country is made up of all kind of people.
08:42So now we are saying for you, if you're a woman and you want to register to vote, you've got to bring your birth certificate and your birth certificate has to match your driver's license, even if you got married.
09:06He said, wait now, when I was born, I was a baby.
09:14You know, when I got married, in most instances, the wife's name changed.
09:22So now you are married, and if you want to register and vote, you've got to go back and get your birth certificate changed to your married name, not your birth name.
09:39So, they said, because that's going to help prove citizenship.
09:45Come on now.
09:47See, because they said, we want to make sure that anyone who votes in America, they are American citizens.
09:55So that's why you get your birth certificate, you know, but it's a trick.
10:01And it's really unfair, because we're the greatest democracy in the world.
10:06You know, most areas, if Philip West came to his precinct and said he was Philip Johnson, they said, no, you're not.
10:17You're Philip West, because I know you.
10:19In this district, it's very highly unlikely for somebody to go vote in their voting precinct, and somebody working at that table don't know them.
10:31I mean, that's just who we are, right?
10:33But there's all this chaos and confusion that's being put out there, and that's what got people so upset with what's going on, because that's not who we are.