Rep. Lateefah Simon, D-Calif., argued that Republicans criticizing Texas Rep. Al Green’s outburst amid President Donald Trump’s speech hearkens back to the Jim Crow era.
As Trump addressed a joint session of Congress at the Capitol on Tuesday, Green stood up and shouted in an effort to deny the president has a mandate. The congressman made a visual spectacle by waving his walking cane as he shouted, as Republicans drowned him out with chants of “USA! USA!”
While the sergeants-at-arms were eventually ordered to restore order by removing the long-serving congressman from the chamber, Green has since doubled down on his outburst.
“It is the best way to get that across to a person who uses his incivility, who uses his incivility against our civility,” Green said of Trump. “He is a person who has consistently used incivility against civility.”
Simon, who had both walked out of Trump’s address and delivered a response to it on behalf of the Working Families Party, condemned the entire Republican Party at the event.
SOCIAL MEDIA ERUPTS AFTER HOUSE DEM AL GREEN INTERRUPTED TRUMP’S ADDRESS: ‘EMBARRASSING THEMSELVES’
“We’re going back to a 1950s America,” she warned. “I want to be very clear about that. For those of us who have parents, who have aunts and uncles and communities that are still alive, who remembered what a Jim Crow America looks like tonight in the chamber, you could look easily to your right, and you could see essentially a monolithic group of folks who look just like one another. And then you went to the left side, and you would see what America truly looks like, a beautiful tapestry of all of us who pray differently, who look differently, who come from four corners of the globe to make this country what it is. We know what we all deserve.”
Simon then went on to condemn Green’s critics, arguing their “racist yelling” was like some segregation-era moment taught about in history classes.
“I got to say, as a new member of Congress, I was shocked at what seemed like a blatant disrespect for the House, and it wasn’t coming from Rep. Green. It was coming from the men behind him on the right side who were telling him and yelling, ‘Sit down!’ I mean, it felt like I was watching something in a history class of racist yelling at an elderly Black man challenging the President of the United States not to cut medical care for the sick,” she said.
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“What have we become?” Simon asked. “Tomorrow means we organize, we enroll folks in continuous care because Medicare and MediCal and Medicaid are still ours in my state, we can’t lose those things. But again, 2026 is too far ahead, folks. Got to get on the ground. We got to get proximate. And I believe that that’s what we will do.”
Fox News’ Stephen Sorace contributed to this report.
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