MW

Steny Hoyer has signed onto each and every crime bill that has ever been written. He’s also referred to marijuana as a gateway drug, failing to take steps toward ending the war on drugs that disproportionately affects minorities. Being someone who was arrested for possession of marijuana eight years ago, I was directly impacted in that way.

He’s also refused to support policies such as Medicare for All to ensure that we all have adequate health care and treat health care as a human right. When I was pregnant with my daughter, I had a high-risk pregnancy and was diagnosed with deep vein thrombosis. I had a blood clot in each knee and one in my lungs. I had to be hospitalized for two weeks in order for the doctors to give me the medicine that I needed, because my insurance company at the time didn’t want to pay for it — even though not paying for it meant that I would die, and that my child who was inside of me would have died as well.

We should also talk about raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, which Hoyer only recently supported after we started our campaign. I was incarcerated for driving on a suspended license because I couldn’t afford to pay traffic tickets, and that essentially came from me not being able to find a job that paid a livable wage. While I was working minimum wage job to minimum wage job, this made it very difficult for me to decide, am I going to pay for this court fine or am I going to put food on the table? Am I going to pay for this traffic ticket, or am I going to pay my light bill for the month?

For people who are in these situations — which is a lot of people, not just in my district but throughout the entire country — they have to differentiate and choose between what they can and can’t afford because we don’t have any jobs that pay a livable wage.

I have a very close friend of mine who has been homeless for the past ten years. She’s forced to live in poverty because she receives disability. If you are only making $700 a month from disability, and the median rent in our district is about $,1500 — that is an issue. That’s just one example of why I think all of these issues are interconnected. You can’t talk about one without talking about the other. Steny Hoyer has had the chance, the opportunity, to create legislation to help people who are in these situations and facing these issues in our community — and he hasn’t.