American politician (born 1982)
Ilhan Abdullahi Omar (born October 4, 1981) is an American politician serving as U.S. Representative for Minnesota's 5th congressional district since 2019. She is a member of the Democratic–Farmer–Labor Party. Before her election to Congress, Omar served in the Minnesota House of Representatives from 2017 to 2019, representing part of Minneapolis. Her congressional district includes all of Minneapolis and some of its first-ring suburbs. Omar serves as whip of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and has advocated for a $15 minimum wage, universal healthcare, student loan debt forgiveness, the protection of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and abolishing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). A frequent critic of Israel, Omar supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement and has denounced its settlement policy and military campaigns in the occupied Palestinian territories, as well as what she describes as the influence of pro-Israel lobbies.
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My brand of optimism is based on my denying myself any sense of victimization and taking comfort in the fact that whatever difficulties present themselves today, they will not exist tomorrow. I believe that by pushing hard enough, you will eventually end up somewhere better. Some have observed that I have an "iron spine." I prefer to see it as a process of figuring out how to channel every challenge into an opportunity. That mentality, which worked in the state house, has always worked for me.
In 1991, you pleaded guilty to two counts of withholding information from Congress regarding your involvement in the Iran-Contra affair, for which you were later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush... I fail to understand why members of this committee or the American people should find any testimony that you give today to be truthful... You later said that the U.S. policy in El Salvador was a 'fabulous achievement...Yes or no: Do you still think so?...The American people want to know that any time we engage a country, that we think about what our actions could be and how we believe our values are being furthered.... Whether, under your watch, a genocide will take place, and you will look the other way because American interests were being upheld, is a fair question.
(Questions & Comments were made during a House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing Wednesday regarding President Trump's Venezuela envoy Elliott Abrams).
when we engage in the creation of our foreign policy, we are truly disconnected from the foreign nations that it will impact and the humans who are going to be impacted by our foreign policy. And so, even as we think about capitalism and we think about our trade policies and we think about the creation of jobs and we think about the fight for unionized labor here, oftentimes when we talk about dignified workplace, we don’t connect that to be something that someone else deserves in another country. And so, when you’re thinking about Mexico or Honduras or El Salvador or any of these countries that we might ship our jobs to and have a working environment there, we don’t think about the fact that these organizations, these corporations are now going to be exploiting workers over there. It’s not just that we are losing jobs, but there is literally going to be an exploitation of workers over there.
I get the urge to focus on disaffected Trump voters. Democrats pride themselves on being a big-tent party. We want to show disaffected Republicans that there’s a political home for them outside Trump’s GOP. But appealing to these voters while alienating more progressive, diverse nonvoters doesn’t make sense. For every moderate, suburban Republican on the fence about Trump, there are lines of cooks, homeworkers, dishwashers, cashiers and farm workers who would vote a straight Democratic ticket if they were just given a reason to do so. My message to my colleagues across the country is simple: Don’t listen to Trump. Speak to the people who need us the most. Focus on those who don’t have a voice and who will support our boldest and most enduring ideas as a party. Give nonvoters a reason to turn out to vote. That’s who this party should be for. It’s who this party should be talking to. And it’s who we should be counting on to build a coalition to defeat Trump in November.
The politics of "moral clarity and courage," which I often reference, includes lending one's voice and listening. There is no way to do the kind of work I do, to have the honest dialogues that lead to solutions to constituents' issues, without bumping into things and hurting others. That's just human nature. Ideally, though, I remedy it. While not popular in the Trumpian vision for America, introspection and contrition are signs not of weakness but of strength.