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We need to incentivize states across our country to spend on higher education and ensure that we go back to allowing people to go to college tuition-free.
Pramila Jayapal
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Gays and lesbians gained rights in this country though activism and organizing, creating political space and demanding change so that lawmakers and justices could do what they knew was right. That organizing allowed Americans to get to know gays and lesbians as our daughters and sons, our neighbors, and our friends.
Pramila Jayapal
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This is the country that we are turning over to young people, and there is going to be no country left at this rate because Trump is destroying the soul of who we are.
Pramila Jayapal
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Rather than name-calling and arguing about whether it is appropriate or not to employ radical tactics, we progressives need to start listening to each other.
Pramila Jayapal
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After 9/11, I had just become an American citizen, and I remember sitting in front of my TV set watching the news of the attacks, in tears. I remember thinking to myself, 'Nothing is ever going to be the same in this country for people who look like me.'
Pramila Jayapal
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I have an incredibly supportive family.
Pramila Jayapal
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I have my chops in organizing, and I know how to create political space through movement building.
Pramila Jayapal
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I was on the committee that helped raise the minimum wage here in Seattle. I introduced a statewide bill to raise the minimum wage in Washington state my first year in the state senate, and I really believe that raising the federal minimum wage, while not the answer to everything, addresses a lot of the issues at the very bottom.
Pramila Jayapal
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Every hour that goes by with family separation policies in effect is another hour that mothers weep thinking of their children, another hour that kids are fearfully wondering where their parents have been taken, another hour that trauma deepens.
Pramila Jayapal
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Can you be a progressive if you're anti-immigrant but pro-choice? No!
Pramila Jayapal
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It took me 17 years to become a U.S. citizen.
Pramila Jayapal
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Individuals whose asylum claims have been accepted have gone on to become professors, soldiers in our military, artists, and more.
Pramila Jayapal
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Having a strong race lens means you understand racism is threaded through and institutionalized in all of our systems and our very perceptions, threaded through how someone looks at you, treats you, thinks about you and your potential.
Pramila Jayapal
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Districts are really different across the country, but the more that people on the progressive Left show power at the ballot box - and reclassify some of the ideas that we've called 'progressive,' but that are really mainstream ideas, like college for all - the better.
Pramila Jayapal
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If there is one thing that resonates for women, it is that regardless of where we come from or what we look like, we want to be fully recognized for the breadth of our contributions.
Pramila Jayapal
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The fact that the immigration issue was the first thing Trump took aim at was a good thing for me, because it's what I spent my life working on. It became a place to see what we've become as a country, and how overreach can actually serve to bring those of us on the Left and Democrats together.
Pramila Jayapal
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When I was a little girl, my dad always said to me that I was going to be this great businesswoman, that I was going to be the CEO of IBM. So that's what I came into the world thinking, that I was going to go into the business world and make my mark there.
Pramila Jayapal
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History has always judged silence and complicity harshly in these times of moral consequence.
Pramila Jayapal
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I really get my best work done in the morning, so if I have to edit speeches or comments, that all happens before I get to work.
Pramila Jayapal
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Regardless of who is elected president in 2016, we all still live together. Each of us has a different role to play, but we all have to hold the collective space for movement-building together. It's the only way we move forward.
Pramila Jayapal
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We can never be afraid to stand up for what is right, no matter what others may say. And sometimes, if that means taking a lonely road, if what we are standing for is true, then perhaps moonlight or sunshine will light our way and make it less lonely.
Pramila Jayapal
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We have to take our anger and rage and channel it into building, growing, loving, holding each other up.
Pramila Jayapal
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Those who have the most power - whether famous TV anchors, rich Hollywood moguls, judges, Members of Congress, or the president of the United States - must decide how to exert that power: for corruption or for good.
Pramila Jayapal
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We have to remember that disagreeing with people is fine; it is dehumanizing people that is not, and when that happens, we have to be ready to speak up.
Pramila Jayapal
