Democrat Rep. Maxwell Frost addressed Kevin McCarthy being ousted as House Speaker during an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. McCarthy was voted out as a result of both Democrats and Republicans opposing having him as House Speaker. Many have pointed out this being revealing of existing cracks within the Republican Party.
“Why didn’t you Democrats save Kevin McCarthy? Because you’re young, you may not understand that everything the Republicans do to each other is the responsibility of Democrats to fix?” Colbert asked Frost.
To that, the Congressman replied that the Republicans need “a lot more than me to fix what they have going on.”
“And I’d say No. 2, which is very important, is, look, we’ve been fighting to save food stamps, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid this entire year as Republicans have been working to take that away, take away that funding,” he added. “So I’m just letting them pull themselves up by their bootstraps, you know what I mean?”
Frost recently helped implement the government’s first Office of Gun Violence Prevention, which President Joe Biden signed last month. The Democrat representative first got into the public eye by his involvement as an organizer of March for Our Lives in Florida after the Parkland school shooting.
He was sworn in to represent Florida’s 10th Congressional District earlier this year. At the time, he addressed the news in correlation to him being arrested for participating in a Black Lives Matter protest in 2020.
2020 and 2023.
The same streets I was arrested on for nonviolent protest, I’ll be representing in the United States Congress. pic.twitter.com/d8T6tdzELA
— Maxwell Alejandro Frost (@MaxwellFrostFL) January 7, 2023
At 26-years-old, Frost is the first Gen Z member of Congress. He was adopted and raised in Orlando by his mother, a Cuban refugee who teaches special ed at a public school, and a father, who is a musician.
“The joke is, you walk into the Capitol, look around, and you’re like, ‘How did I get here?’” he told Esquire in an interview. “Then you spend a few months listening to some of your colleagues, and you’re like, ‘How the hell did they get here?’”
Frost told the outlet that his priorities are set on expanding access to the arts and improving public housing and transportation in Orlando. Since being sworn in, he secured $11.3 million to invest in his community and has had all of his funding proposals approved by the Appropriations Committee.
