Auchincloss takes aim at Republicans on economy
FALL RIVER — US Representative Jake Auchincloss on Thursday said Republicans are at once tanking the economy and attempting to undo America’s social safety net.
Auchincloss told the Globe in a brief interview that President Trump’s tariffs could tip the country into a recession.
“They are attacking the tenants of Americans’ financial freedom right now,” he said by a local Social Security office. “So, at the same time as they are taking a good economy and shoving it over a cliff, they are also cutting the social safety net meant to protect people in a bad economy - Social security and Medicaid, which they’re trying to cut.”
President Trump has said he won’t cut social security or Medicaid benefits, but the administration has suggested that it wants to eliminate what it claims is the waste and fraud in the system.
Auchincloss, a Democrat who represents Massachusetts’ 4th congressional district, which runs from Fall River to Newton and Brookline, said that his party will deploy a wide variety of tools to fight the Trump administration.
“Litigation, legislation, appropriations, but we’re also going to do it outside the halls of Congress, like I am here at the Fall River Social Security office, like we are when we’re building public rallies in Republican districts,” he said. “Ultimately, this does not get better until [House Speaker] Mike Johnson and [Senate Majority leader] John Thune lose their jobs.”
The lawmaker suggested that things will change if Democrats win power in Congress in the midterms in 2026.
Asked if in the meantime, legal challenges will be critical to his party’s approach to challenging President Trump, Auchincloss said that there was more that could be done.
“The courts are critical, but we can’t make the courts fight alone. We have to put pressure for Congress to fight,” he said. “And we have to build solidarity across sectors. Not just universities, not just law firms, not just business leaders, not just social services providers. All of them."
In places like Fall River, a blue bastion that went Republican for the first time in a century in last November’s presidential election, Democrats, he said, need to focus on issues that pushed voters towards Trump — primarily what he called the exploding cost of living.
“Democrats need to become the doctors of cost disease. We need to address inflation within housing, health care, child care in particular, and put forward an economic agenda to do that,” he said.
Auchincloss also suggested that the Trump administration immigration policies, were not about border security.
“These lawless deportations and bullying of immigrants, it’s not about border security immigration, it’s an attack on freedom,” he said.
“Freedom means is that if your feet touch American soil, you get to stand in front of a judge against the awesome power of the state and put forward the facts with the confidence that there will be an impartial application of law based on those facts.”
The mistaken removal of Kilmar Abrego Garciato to El Salvador threatened the freedom of not just immigrants, the congressman said.
“What they are doing to this man from Maryland that they have wrongfully deported to El Salvador, is an attack not upon just that man’s freedom, it’s an attack upon Americans’ freedom,” he told the Globe.
By: Omar Mohammed
Source: Boston Globe