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Congressional Daily Record
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March 24, 2026
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Download official House Record PDFReturn to issue contextUnder the Speaker's announced policy of January 3, 2025, Ms. McClellan of Virginia was recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the minority leader.
General Leave
Ms. McCLELLAN. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent that all Members may have 5 legislative days to revise and extend their remarks and include extraneous material on the subject matter of this Special Order.
The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Kennedy of Utah). Is there objection to the request of the gentlewoman from Virginia?
There was no objection.
Ms. McCLELLAN. Mr. Speaker, it is Women's History Month.
foundation for our community success, Black women continue to push the needle.
monumental achievements and highlight every pivotal moment in history in which Black women have tipped the scales toward progress and singlehandedly moved our country forward.
brought consequences to every vulnerable community but have specifically attacked the foundation of Black women's economic success and social impact.
President Trump's leadership, and the administration remains committed to eliminating critical programs that build a strong foundation and a pathway to economic opportunities for Black women across the Nation.
Black Caucus takes the floor tonight so that our Members can lift them up.
achievements of Black women throughout the history of our Nation, I think back to the roots of our Nation, the birthplace of American democracy and American slavery, none other than my home, Virginia.
lawmaking body in the Western Hemisphere, the first legislative assembly in the New World, the Virginia General Assembly.
with “20 and odd” Africans captured by Portuguese slavers in west- central Africa that were traded for provisions. Among them, there was at least one woman that we know of.
colony with the recruitment of English women to Jamestown to make wives to the inhabitants. Those women arrived with no right to vote, no right to hold public office, and no right to control their own property.
racism and sexism. Tonight, we will uplift their stories, how we did overcome, but we still have a long way to go to truly be equal under the law, to truly take part in the American Dream.
Mr. Speaker, to start that conversation, I yield to the gentlewoman from New York (Ms. Clarke), our chair.
{time} 1930
Ms. CLARKE of New York. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman from Virginia for anchoring this evening's Congressional Black Caucus Special Order hour and for her diligence and commitment to sending the message of the CBC throughout this Nation.
Mr. Speaker, I rise today as chair of the Congressional Black Caucus and co-chair of the Congressional Caucus on Black Women & Girls to recognize Women's History Month and the countless contributions women have made to our Nation and to the world.
background for their achievements, which have too often been overlooked, celebrating the progress and rights secured by those who have paved the way.
Even as we celebrate, we must confront a difficult truth: many of the same barriers that our mothers and grandmothers fought to dismantle unfortunately persist today. Disparities in access to capital, education, opportunity, and power remain far too wide.
We cannot ignore the growing efforts to roll back hard-won rights. We cannot yield to forces that would usher in a future where the next generation of women has fewer freedoms than those who came before them.
This is not an exaggeration or hyperbole. Policies that undermine diversity, equity, and inclusion already having real consequences, including the displacement of over 300,000 Black women from the workforce on the basis of DEI dog whistles.
Let's be clear. These are not statistics. These are our mothers, daughters, entrepreneurs, and essential workers whose contributions are being shoved aside and whitewashed.
speak plainly about the threats to women's voting rights, bodily autonomy, and economic opportunities to support their families.
Mr. Speaker, we are not going back. We owe it to those who came before us and those who will follow to stand firm in defense of that progress.
Ms. McCLELLAN. Mr. Speaker, I now yield to the gentlewoman from New Jersey, Representative LaMonica McIver.
Mrs. McIVER. Mr. Speaker, I thank the fine gentlewoman of Virginia (Ms. McClellan) for anchoring tonight's Special Order hour to celebrate Women's History Month and to celebrate and speak truth tonight. I am glad to be standing here during Women's History Month right after Black History Month to celebrate specifically Black women.
Black women have always looked at this country and thought and asked: How can I make it better? They then fought for that “better.”
bring a folding chair. We have always stood in the gaps. We have a long history of being first to take on the fights that others would not take on.
friends, and deciding to step in to protect the vulnerable and speak out for the voiceless, especially when those in power won't fight for us. We fight for us.
We know our liberation is tied to the liberation of others: Black, Brown, immigrant, citizens, every race, every gender, all of us. We know that truth, and that is why there is continually so much effort put toward stopping us. Even if this very body in this very Chamber, Black women are under attack.
foundations of our freedom and history. We are seeing the effects of reckless economic policies, forcing hundreds of thousands of Black women out of the workforce. We are watching Black women stripped of our healthcare and maternal care. With every statistic, there are real human costs behind them.
feel: powerless, hopeless, angry, and tired. It is the example of the Black women leaders that came before me that remind me that we cannot back down. There is no progress through comfort.
Now is not the time to become complacent. Yes, we are tired. We are being pushed, but now is the moment for neck-deep courage.
Just last month I was in Selma for the remembrance of Bloody Sunday. A speaker referenced how in Exodus, Moses went neck-deep into the Red Sea before it was parted. He took the first step toward a raging ocean because he knew that his prayer to be liberated would manifest.
facing the threat of death, because she knew that freedom was worth fighting for.
Mr. Speaker, the toughest fights to freedom require you to go neck- deep. Every generation must step up and ask: Are we neck-deep people? And one thing I know is that is who Black women truly are. I am saying it plain: Black women are under attack, but we are not going to be silenced or scared—not now, not ever.
Ms. McCLELLAN. Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentlewoman (Mrs. McIver) for her comments, and I am proud to be in this fight with her.
both the birthplace of American slavery and the birthplace of American democracy. That dichotomy I have always found both ironic and inspiring.
Jefferson, the Declaration of Independence, which wrote that all men are created equal and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
women at all in that decree, and he certainly didn't include the men, women, and children that he owned in bondage at Monticello, including the mother of his children. That ideal upon which our country was founded sparked the imagination of the men, women, and children in bondage across this young Nation.
The men at that convention ignored her advice. They wrote a constitution creating a government by, of, and for we the people. They didn't include women. They didn't include the men, women, and children enslaved at the home of James Madison, the architect of The Virginia Plan that led to the Constitution. In fact, those men, women, and children weren't counted as people at all. They were counted as three- fifths of a person for purposes of identifying how many Members of Congress would serve in this body.
Many of those women were viewed as broodmares. Many of them were forced to care for other people's children while theirs were stolen. They forced to nurse other people's children while they ached for their own.
have fought to be included in “we the people.” We have fought to expand suffrage beyond White land-owning men along with White women, even when we were the last throughout the South to benefit from that labor.
{time} 1940
the franchise. Often, how far we went determined whether the Federal Government did its part to expand we the people beyond those original White, land-owning men.
me to be the first Black woman to represent Virginia in Congress, historymakers from all generations who fought for the right to fully participate in our democracy because they recognized that, in a government by, of, and for the people, government will only reflect the perspective of and, therefore, meet the needs of those who participate.
and in the aftermath of the Civil War, the nascent women's rights movement, which stated at its first convention in the “Declaration of Sentiments” that all men and women were created equal—yet, with the 14th Amendment, the seeds of division were sown.
for the first time ever inserted the word “male” in the U.S. Constitution, a fissure began in the suffrage movement and the women's rights movement that pitted some—not all, some—White women against Black women because they would not support suffrage for Black men before White women.
from Virginia. They are hard to find. They are usually seen described as community leaders, not suffragettes. Yet, when you read between the lines of their papers and their work, you see what they were really up to.
Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Incorporated. Founded 113 years ago in January 1913, in their first public act, the 22 founders marched in Washington in the Women's Suffrage Procession down Pennsylvania Avenue. Yet, they and every other Black woman who showed up to march that day were told that they had to march in the back because the organizers of that march did not want to offend Southern allies.
Ida B. Wells famously refused to march in the back. She said that she was going to march with her delegation. The chair of her delegation, Genevieve Stone, was the only delegation member who said that she could march with her delegation.
with other university women, marking their first public act as a sorority. It is fitting that I call them out today because thousands of members of Delta Sigma Theta were on the Hill today, still fighting to preserve access to the vote as the SAVE Act is being debated down the hall, a modern-day poll tax that would require everyone to produce documents to prove their citizenship.
show the same name as on your birth certificate, aren't good enough. One of my soror Members of Congress, Joyce Beatty, told a story yesterday to those Deltas assembled about how, when she went to get her REAL ID—this is a good example of the hurdles you would have to go through to meet the requirements of the SAVE Act—she showed up with her birth certificate and was told that it was not good enough. It is a copy. You need the original.
another copy of the original and brought that back. That is not good enough. The
certificate. That wasn't good enough because the name on the marriage certificate still didn't match the birth certificate because she had been married before.
decree and show the chain of custody of her name just to be able to get a REAL ID to prove that she was a U.S. citizen who could fly.
under the SAVE Act. She would have to go through all those same hoops all over again.
confronting obstacles, going over them, around them, through them, for that sacred right to participate in a government by, of, and for the people.
Constitution, my grandmothers, my mother, and my great-grandmothers didn't benefit. They all lived in the South. Through poll taxes, literacy tests, and other mechanisms, they were still denied access to the ballot.
Many Black women fought against these obstacles. Fannie Lou Hamer, a sharecropper from Mississippi, was jailed, evicted from her home, fired from her job, and severely beaten for daring to try to register to vote. Hamer cofounded the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to challenge an all-White delegation to the Democratic National Convention.
of the civil rights movement, played a crucial role in organizing the Montgomery bus boycott, which was inspired by another woman, Rosa Parks, who herself made waves when she refused to give up her seat on the bus for a White passenger and was arrested.
SNCC, and encouraged students to take charge of their activism and continue to make their perspectives heard. Another SNCC leader, Diane Nash, became one of the most well-known figures in Nashville and helped to organize sit-ins and sustained Freedom Rides throughout the Deep South.
the Big Six of the civil rights movement. She was one of the leaders of the six organizations that planned the March on Washington. Yet, she was the only one of the six who didn't speak that day because the five male leaders excluded women from the speaking program.
able to vote and to overcome the intersection between racism and sexism.
These are just a few of the women who fought for the right to vote. There are other rights that women were denied, particularly Black women, solely because of the color of their skin.
{time} 1950
worker rights to many, many workers. What most people don't know is that those rights explicitly excluded so-called Jim Crow jobs, domestic workers as the main example. Those jobs were jobs that once were performed by Black men and women for free during slavery, then from very low wages because they were the only jobs available to Black people, particularly in the South.
My mother's family saw this firsthand. My mother grew up in the Gulf Coast of Mississippi, a little town called DeLisle. DeLisle had no school for Black children because the State of Mississippi didn't think them worth educating.
She was the third youngest of 14 children. She was born in 1932, her oldest sibling born in 1918. There was one school that would teach those children. It was the Catholic Church, but it only went to the eighth grade. When her brothers graduated eighth grade, the only jobs available to them were as laborers. When her sisters graduated, the only jobs available to them were as domestic workers or home care workers. Her siblings, her sisters, her mother, her grandmothers, her great-grandmothers were domestics. She wanted more.
She had to leave her hometown to go to high school. She had to leave her State to get a job, but she did it. By the time I came along in the 1970s, she was running the TRIO Programs at Virginia State University, three federally-funded programs that helped first-generation and at- risk students get to, thrive in, and graduate from college.
as it works to dismantle the Department of Education. The Department of Education which was created to fill gaps that State and local governments refused to fill, particularly to meet the educational needs and protect the civil rights of students with disabilities.
because the rights that many of us take for granted, minimum wage, overtime protections, wage theft protections, antidiscrimination laws at the Federal level and in most States, guess who is excluded. Domestic workers.
Black and Brown women across the country struggle to take care of themselves and their own families as they take care of the needs of others.
Virginia the first State in the South to do it—the Domestic Worker Bill of Rights, to remove these outdated, antiquated, and racist exclusions. Those exclusions still exist in Federal law.
our very existence here to Shirley Chisholm, who in 1968 became the first Black woman elected to Congress, representing New York's 12th Congressional District.
She didn't get a warm welcome here. She decided not to abide by longstanding expectations that first-term Members fly under the radar. “I have no intention of just sitting quietly and observing,” she said. “I intend to focus . . . on the Nation's problems.” So she and 12 other Members of Congress founded the Congressional Black Caucus, the conscience of the Congress, which 55 years later stands at 66 members strong; 32 Black women, the most in history, two for the first time ever serving in the United States Senate.
major party's nomination for President the year I was born, in 1972. While she lost the primary in that race, she continued to serve in Congress for another 11 years. She served on the Committee on Agriculture, and she used that role to expand access to nutrition to millions of poor men, women, and children through the SNAP program, which last year faced the largest cuts in American history and threatened to take food out of the mouths of 42 million Americans.
the face of the intense objections her very existence in this body inspired in some people. She famously said: “If they don't give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.” Thanks to that folding chair, I and 31 other women stand on her shoulders.
to the United States Senate in 1992, and so many others have allowed little girls everywhere to look at this Capitol and finally say: I belong there too.
country was founded. Yet, every time we have made progress, there has been a backlash that has involved violence, voter suppression, and propaganda. We are living through the mother-of-all backlashes.
who grew up in the first generation after the Emancipation Proclamation—men who gained the right to vote, who gained the opportunity for social and economic wealth. Black women were there every step of the way in that progress. They also were among those who were lynched for it. They were also among the ones who were beaten for it, but they persevered anyway.
Today, we are facing another backlash to progress. It has pushed 300,000 Black women out of the Federal workforce by an all-out assault by the Trump administration through DOGE. We have seen millions at risk of losing
expiration of the Enhanced Premium Tax Credits under the Affordable Care Act, which turned 16 yesterday.
That was personal to me. I was pregnant. Matter of fact, I was the first member of the Virginia House of Delegates to be pregnant while in office 16 years ago when Congress passed the Affordable Care Act. I remember how excited I was that this law could move mountains in solving the maternal healthcare crisis, which was on my mind in my first trimester of pregnancy. I was so excited that for the first time prenatal visits, postnatal visits, and breastfeeding counseling and equipment would be covered by health insurance. I was excited that for the first time pregnancy would not be a preexisting condition that could lead to the denial of health insurance for a woman.
{time} 2000
create our own State-based healthcare exchange. So you can imagine my frustration when my Republican colleagues who were in control at the time said we are not doing that. But like many Black women before me, I persisted. We fought and fought until we finally convinced enough Republicans in 2018 to expand Medicaid.
and we saw health outcomes improve, particularly for pregnant and not pregnant Black women. We saw the statistic begin to turn around where no longer would a Black woman be three times more likely to die within a year of childbirth because before she was pregnant she got connected to a medical home and could get the care she needed for underlying healthcare conditions that made the pregnancy more risky. All of that is now under attack.
enhanced premium tax credits had on the Virginia marketplace now that we have had our first open enrollment since they expired. Mr. Speaker, 19,000 Virginians didn't renew because they couldn't afford the premium. About 20,000 Virginians renewed but then terminated their coverage because they couldn't afford the premiums.
daughter have seen their premiums go from roughly $600 to over $1,000. I can understand why so many of them are struggling to decide: Can I afford that health insurance premium?
grocery prices, they are wondering which of these bills is going to give, and unfortunately, they are gambling that they are not going to get sick or injured. They are still going to get sick or injured, and when they do they are going to show up at the hospital. They are going to be treated. Somebody is going to pay for that, and that is the rest of us.
worker rights, access to equal pay, access to equality under the law, we have made a lot of progress, and all of that progress is being chipped away as we speak.
But the women of the Congressional Black Caucus are persistent. Yes, we are fighting the same fights as other mothers, our grandmothers, and our great-grandmothers, and we could be angry about that. We would have every right to be. We could be despondent. We could give up, but we don't because we fight those fights from a position of more strength and power than our ancestors ever imagined. We fight those fights so that our daughters and our granddaughters and our great-granddaughters don't have to, but if they do, they will fight those fights from a position of more strength and power than we can imagine.
history is so offensive to me personally because we are telling those stories in my family, but they weren't told in my history books. For a long time they weren't told in our public museums and our public spaces. Now, we have begun to tell the stories. Under the President's DEI executive order many of those stories are being removed.
talk about it. He thinks we talk too much about it. But slavery is the original sin of this country. Slavery is the original wound that is still gaping in this country because it never healed. It never healed because we didn't talk about it, and we didn't address it. And just like any wound caused by a family member, if you don't talk about it and then address it, it festers. It festers until it is infected, and then comes death.
My family is coming here for spring break on Friday. My kids came last year, as well. It was a vote week. So, as we always do, we went to all of the Smithsonian museums. We went to The National Museum of African American History and Culture, and we went to the exhibit on slavery. We went to the exhibit on the middle passage. As I stood in that exhibit, I imagined what it must have been like to be stolen from your home and your family, placed on a ship, the bowels of a ship, in inhumane conditions, treated like animals. I imagined how many people chose to jump because the alternative they feared when they arrived at these shores was worse than death. How many died because they couldn't hold on?
A year ago as I stood in that exhibit, a voice came to me and said: Somebody survived that so that you can be here in this moment in this fight in this time. That is what keeps us going. We remember the pain and the joy and the fight and the progress of our ancestors. We owe it to them to build on their success and to tell their stories even when they are uncomfortable, the good, the bad, and the ugly.
month allows us to focus in on stories that for too often in our history went untold. Yet, we have agencies at the Federal Government from the Department of Defense on down that don't even recognize those months or allow their employees to. We have an administration that threatens and bullies private companies if they try to.
We have to tell the story. We owe it to those that came before us who lived it to tell the stories because how many people do you think knew when they voted for the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights that the women who held those roles who were mostly Black and Brown didn't have the same rights that they took for granted? I can tell you very few did until they were told. They had no reason to.
We are going to continue to tell these stories. We are going to continue to fight for that progress. We are going to continue to be the conscience of the Congress even when the Congress doesn't want to hear from us. We are going to hold this President accountable, and we are going to make him listen to the stories even when he wants to shut us up because that is why we are here.
table, bring a folding chair. She didn't want us to just sit there and be quiet. She wanted us to speak truth to power. She wanted us to continue her work and the work of everyone that came before her. We are going to do that.
Mr. Speaker, I thank everyone for their attention tonight, and I yield back the balance of my time.