This week, President-elect Donald Trump held his first news conference in more than 150 days. In that time, our next President of the United States attacked the media, refused to disavow Vladimir Putin's offensive against our democracy and continued to disregard the very real ethical conflict that arises from his refusal to divest from his business interests before taking the oath of office.
At the exact same time Mr. Trump was arguing with the media, I was joined by Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi and several House Democrats from across the industrial heartland where I introduced the Overseas Outsourcing Accountability Act, which would require President-elect Trump to put forth a clear strategy to end outsourcing across our country.
The contrast between our priorities at that very moment could not have been any clearer. Even though Republicans will now have total control over the federal government, Democrats will never stop fighting for a better future for working men and women.
As one piece of evidence: I represent families from rural America - families from small towns and manufacturing communities who know what it means to be laid off and have their job shipped overseas. Just five years ago, during my first campaign for Congress, Bain Capital, which was once run by Mitt Romney, shut down a Sensata manufacturing plant in Freeport, Illinois - a small Midwestern town of about 25,000 in the northwest corner of our state. When Bain shut that factory down, they shipped all 170 of those good-paying jobs from Freeport to China.
One of those jobs used to belong to a woman named Dot Turner. When Dot turned 18, like a lot of men and women from her generation, she went to work at the local factory. And after working at Sensata for more than 40 years, her final days were spent training her Chinese replacement before getting on her hands and knees to scrape the tape off the factory floor.
Too many of the families I represent know how it feels to see factories that have been cornerstones of their community for generations, padlocked and abandoned. They have felt the dignity that comes from a hard day's work, but many of them also know the uncertainty and fear that comes from not knowing how they'll feed their children.
And, despite his record of outsourcing the production of his Trump brand products to at least 12 countries, Donald Trump successfully tapped into that frustration and won my Congressional District.
But now that he's about to take the Oath of Office, it's beyond time for him to learn that you can't solve the very real challenges facing Congressional Districts like mine 140 characters at a time. House Democrats have been very clear about our commitment to creating jobs and growing our economy through the "Make It In America" plan, however the Republican majority has blocked it for the last six years.
Regardless of the strategy he will pursue, President-elect Trump owes it to Dot and to workers across our country to, at a bare minimum, lay out a clear strategy to stop outsourcing rather than changing policy from tweet to tweet.
At his Wednesday press conference, Donald Trump said that he "will be the greatest jobs producer that God ever created." Well Mr. Trump, as the old Russian proverb says, "A man is judged by his deeds, not his words."
Congresswoman Cheri Bustos is in her third term representing Illinois’ Quad-Cities, Peoria and Rockford. She is the co-chair of the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee.