Democratic Congressman Removed From Trump Speech in Middle of Protest

At the beginning of Donald Trump’s address to Congress Tuesday night, Democratic Representative Al Green was removed from the chamber after interrupting the president.

Green reportedly kept yelling at Trump, “You have no mandate to cut Medicaid!” The Houston-area congressman, 77, also waved his cane in the direction of the president. Speaker Mike Johnson warned Green to stop several times—before ordering the sergeant of arms to remove him from the chamber.

Green’s removal is unprecedented in the history of presidential addresses to Congress, as dissenting members of Congress usually aren’t removed from the chamber, even if they’ve shouted at the president. Green, who has already introduced articles of impeachment against Trump, probably won’t mind being the first.

The radical divide in American politics was on full display during Donald Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress from the very moment he stepped into the upper chamber.

As the president passed droves of fawning Republican lawmakers, a small protest by one Democrat was snatched away from her by a member across the aisle.

Representative Melanie Stansbury held up a sheet of paper that read, “This is not normal,” before Texas Representative Lance Gooden ripped it away from the New Mexico Democrat and tossed it in the air.

Democrats have spent days deciding how to protest Trump’s unofficial State of the Union address. A small faction decided not to attend. That included Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Senator Patty Murray, the latter of whom on Monday said that the true state of the union saw Trump “spitting in the face of the law.”

But that plan flew in the face of the silent protest top Democrats in Congress had organized. In a letter issued Monday, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries urged his party to make a “strong” and “dignified” presence at Trump’s speech, rather than run away. During Trump’s address, a large collection of Democratic women on the left side of the aisle were seen wearing pink while men wore blue and yellow ties in quiet opposition to Trump’s agenda.

“There is nothing I can do to make them laugh or smile or applaud,” Trump told the chamber once his speech began, and after Texas Representative Al Green had been booted from the session by House Speaker Mike Johnson. Trump then went on to argue that he deserved the adoration of Democrats on the basis that he had already made “astronomical achievements” in his time in office.

“This is a time for big dreams and bold action,” Trump continued, underscoring his executive orders withdrawing the U.S. from the U.N. Human Rights Council and the World Health Organization, and his freeze on hiring federal workers and on delivering foreign aid, among other monumentally disruptive executive actions.

Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency is charged with eliminating waste, fraud, and abuse. But some of its employees are earning hefty taxpayer-funded paychecks. 

Wired reports that some software engineers and executives who are part of DOGE are drawing six-figure salaries, in some cases from the government agencies they are cutting. For example, Jeremy Lewin, a DOGE staffer assigned to the General Services Administration who helped lead attacks on the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and the National Institutes of Health, is pulling in $167,000 per year. 

In another instance, Kyle Schutt, a software engineer at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, is making a salary of $195,200, the maximum annual salary that a “General Schedule” federal employee can make, including bonuses. And Nate Cavanaugh, 28, whose work for DOGE comprises interviewing GSA employees, makes over $120,500 per year. That’s close to what the average GSA employee, who typically has been with the agency for 13 years, earns per year at $128,565.

When he began recruiting for DOGE in November, Musk described the work as “tedious” and said “compensation is zero,” calling his ideal candidates “super high-IQ small-government revolutionaries willing to work 80+ hours per week on unglamorous cost-cutting.” So far, the pseudo-agency has tapped into vital government systems and fired thousands of employees. 

Now it appears that compensation is far higher than zero for at least a few employees. Despite Musk describing DOGE as “maximum transparent,” spending and salary ranges for the effort have not been made public. A recent report says that DOGE has received about $40 million in funding, and the White House did not respond to Wired’s questions about salary ranges or where DOGE’s funding is coming from in the federal budget.

DOGE’s cuts are ostensibly supposed to be saving taxpayers money, but not only are some of its employees drawing a high salary, government spending has actually gone up since the inauguration. Plus, while DOGE was claiming billions of dollars in savings, it has had to go back and make corrections to many of its claims, showing that its boasts were exaggerated or fraudulent.

The high salaries seem to be part of the many lies coming from Musk and his pet project about how much money DOGE is saving and what it’s actually doing. It shouldn’t be much of a surprise from a greedy welfare billionaire who owes much of his wealth to government funding, and who is enriching himself even more with his and Donald Trump’s government overhaul.   

Donald Trump’s top lawyer Alina Habba defended the firing of thousands of U.S. military veterans on Tuesday, claiming they “perhaps” aren’t capable of doing their jobs.

“You know, we care about veterans tremendously.… But at the same time, we have taxpayer dollars, we have a fiscal responsibility to use taxpayer dollars to pay people that actually work,” Habba told reporters on Tuesday. “That doesn’t mean that we forget our veterans by any means, we are going to care for them in the right way, but perhaps they’re not fit to have a job at this moment or not willing to come to work.

“And we can’t, you know, I wouldn’t take money from you and pay somebody and say sorry, you know, they’re not going to come to work,” Habba said. “It’s just not acceptable.”

As part of the Department of Government Efficiency’s purge of the federal government, Trump and Elon Musk have fired an estimated 6,000 veterans from the federal workforce as of last week. Veterans make up one-third of the federal workforce.

The mass firings have also exacerbated a longtime staffing shortage at the Department of Veteran Affairs. More than 2,000 VA employees have been fired since Trump took office, hindering their ability to seek health care or adjudicate their disability claims.

Last week, DOGE also canceled over 800 contracts that help VA employees with hiring as well as offering medical services and cancer programs, though some of the cancellations have since been walked back, making things even more confusing.

The cuts have sparked outrage among veterans and Democratic lawmakers. The two groups have banded together against the president, despite an estimated 65 percent of veterans who voted in the 2024 election having backed Trump, according to exit polling.

“Donald Trump and Elon Musk are utterly betraying our veterans—indiscriminately firing men and women who have served our nation in uniform and endangering the care and benefits they deserve and have earned,” Democratic Senator Patty Murray said in a statement last week.

But Habba justified Trump’s attack on veterans, arguing that it’s their fault they no longer have a job. Her comments come shortly before Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress Tuesday evening, where a number of Democrats have invited fired federal employees—including veterans—as their guests.

Once again, Republicans are asking the American public to forgo the evidence of their eyes and ears.

Republican lawmakers were met with fire and fury over the weekend as their constituents hounded them for failing to intervene in a budget resolution that will result in billions in cuts to Medicaid, as well as refusing to speak out against Elon Musk’s unchecked dissolution of federal agencies and, with it, thousands of federal jobs and popular social programs.

But at least one Republican has decided the best option is to threaten criminal charges for Americans who dare to dissent against Donald Trump’s agenda. Speaking with the Meg Ellefson Show on Friday, Wisconsin Representative Derrick Van Orden likened his constituents to Nazis, claiming that only Communists and fascists would protest their lawmakers.

“People who associated with the Communist movement and the National Socialism movement used to get their way politically, is—they would do stuff like this, and they were called agitators,” Van Orden told the podcast.

Fact check: It was notoriously unsafe to speak out against the government in Soviet Russia, as well as in Nazi Germany. Under the Nazi regime, Germany shuttered anti-Nazi newspapers, controlled what media appeared in newspapers and on the radio, banned books that the Third Reich determined were “un-German,” and by 1934 had made it officially illegal to criticize the Nazi government, according to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Freedom of speech and the right to protest, on the other hand, have been cornerstones of American democracy since the country was founded.

Van Orden then said that if protesters came to his town halls and acted “in an unlawful manner,” or if they were “disrupting or refusing to leave a venue,” then he would have them “arrested and charged with a class B misdemeanor.”

Van Orden’s outlandish comments preceded instructions by the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, who on Tuesday directed party members to stop holding in-person town halls to avoid the backlash. House Speaker Mike Johnson endorsed the order later Tuesday, washing his hands of lawmakers’ upset constituents by watering them down as “professional protesters.”

Meanwhile, Trump explicitly threatened to violate the Constitution on Tuesday, pledging to prosecute protesters and withhold federal funding from universities or schools if attendees choose to express their First Amendment rights.