Mass. representatives, including minority whip, to skip State of the Union address

Politics

The representatives pledged to take various actions in protest, including attending a rally and supporting their direct constituents.

Several members of Congress from Massachusetts have announced that they will be skipping Tuesday’s State of the Union address, including House Minority Whip Katherine Clark.

“Rather than listen to Donald Trump lie to the American people, I will be hearing from the people of my district about their personal experiences with skyrocketing costs, new barriers to health care, dismantled Social Security services, and brutal cuts to medical research,” Clark said in a statement Tuesday.

Clark, who represents Massachusetts’ fifth congressional district, lambasted Trump in the statement for his cuts to health care, increases to insurance premium costs, and implementation of tariffs. Most of all, she criticized him for allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to “terrorize communities” and for evading “truth and transparency” regarding the Epstein files.

“Donald Trump’s presidency has been one broken promise after another, and the people of this country and the Commonwealth deserve so much better,” Clark said in the statement.

Rep. Ayanna Pressley, who represents the Commonwealth’s seventh congressional district, announced that she would dedicate Tuesday to uplifting immigrant children who have been detained by ICE. In a press release, the congresswoman shared the stories of several children who, she said, were detained in Massachusetts and held at the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas.

“The heartless Occupant of the White House has no regard for our nation’s children — his terror campaign is wholesale child abuse — and I have no regard for a man who rips parents away from children, deports families, and imprisons our babies,” Pressley said in the statement. “Instead of giving this man an audience, I am shedding light on the stories of our children and making it known that they deserve more.”

Pressley announced a full day of boycotting the address, including a House of Representatives floor speech, several live interviews, and attending the “People’s State of the Union” rally at the National Mall. Sen. Ed Markey previously confirmed that he also will skip the address and attend the rally.

“The State of the Union should be a reckoning with reality, but Donald Trump will use it to spin fiction and normalize the gross abuse of power,” Markey said in a statement. “He will claim everything is fine while families struggle to afford health care and housing, immigrant communities live in fear, and his billionaire allies loot the country under the cover of chaos. I will not legitimize those lies.”

Rep. Jim McGovern, who represents Massachusetts’ second congressional district, said on Facebook that he would rather “stick needles in (his) eyeballs” than attend the address and called Trump a “pathological liar.”

“These are not normal times,” McGovern said in the post. “This is not business as usual, but I will be there to call out his bulls–t on social media, so stay tuned.”

Though Rep. Lori Trahan, who represents the Commonwealth’s third congressional district, said that she “respects the tradition” of the address, she echoed Clark’s sentiments that attending would not be an effective use of time as a Democratic member of Congress.

“Like many Americans, I believe senators and representatives’ time would be better spent working on real solutions — passing legislation to bring down costs, placing sensible guardrails on Kristi Noem’s rogue ICE agents, and making sure families can see a doctor if they get sick or injured,” Trahan said in a statement. “We will not make progress on any of that by clapping for a president whose policies have pushed the American Dream further out of reach for so many. The American people deserve real action, not hollow applause.”