Hey, hey, everybody. Welcome to the Michael Still podcast. Yes, it's me. I'm still here in one piece as they say.

Yeah, well, we won't get into that. But it's a blessing to have you here. It's a blessing to be here, particularly given everything that's going on. We've turned the turn the corner about to come up a Labor Day schools are back in session.

Conventions are over and things can return to normal, right?

I don't know what normal is. Yes, there it is. There it is. And that is our guest for this hour. Oh my gosh. I'm so so fortunate to have congressman Karen Bass.

On the on the podcast today, she was reelected to her fifth term representing the 37th congressional district in 2018. She serves as the chair of the congressional black caucus and prior to serving in Congress, the Congress member

and the Congress member, served made history actually when the California assembly elected her to be its 67th speaker, catapulting her to become the nation's first African American woman ever to serve as such a powerful role in a state legislature before serving as an elected official.

She's also been interested in community activism, which a lot of us know her from in the past as a child watching the civil rights movement with her father. It was at that time that she made a lifetime commitment to affecting social change in her community and abroad.

She's been a really a decade as a position assistant and served as a clinical instructor at the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine, Physician Assistant Program.

So when the system starts talking to you about COVID-19 and starts talking about the medical consequences of it, y'all shut up and listen. That's how this works.

Welcome to the progress. Such a pleasure to have you. So first off, you're doing well. I hope everything's good. I am doing just fine doing fine and all of this incredible way our lives have been transformed this year.

Well, you have survived. You probably survived the most important and difficult gauntlet so far this year. And that's the vice presidential scrutiny in the run up to the announcement of Ms Harris and Senator Harris as the choice.

But you you in the end there and really probably starting in the midway point when the country began to focus on the real choices, you were always right there and it's said a lot to me, not so much in your role as chair of the caucus or serving in Congress, but there were other features of your life that

I think you know, talking to some of the Biden people, they thought would would be not just a good narrative, but a strong narrative in this environment. How has your experience sort of fashioned you for this moment because this is a challenge to everything that you came into Congress to do and to try to accomplish.

Absolutely. And if you think about what's going on right now, one from COVID, you mentioned my health background. I remember being right at the beginning of AIDS before we. Yes, yes.

I was working in the emergency room and there was nothing about protected equipment because we didn't even know how the virus transpired and thinking about the racial impact of that and also COVID. And then policing, you know, you might have heard me say,

that when I went to Mr Floyd service in Houston and I looked up and I saw the year he was born and the year he was born was the year I first became involved in activities in Los Angeles around police abuse and that was 47 years ago.

So yes, I feel like what is going on right now, the intersection of these issues has really characterized an awful lot of my life.

So Congressman, what what is it? Okay, you just said something that I think really neat people need to focus in on because it's significant on two fronts. One, why black people are still pissed and two, two, why nothing has been done 40 plus years ago.

Right. It was dealing with this issue around police and policing in the black community. And yet here we are. Why the hell can't this get fixed? What is it about this that's so intractable that it seems that almost 50 years later and now what some 60 some years, 62 years.

Not more after Dr King made this the the clarion call for the country. We're still we're still not there yet. I don't know what's your assessment of that.

Well, you know, a couple of things in a way, I think it's similar to the civil rights movement in the sense that, you know, black people have been treated the way they were treated in the South for hundreds of years, right.

But civil rights movement when there were cameras that showed the abuse and there was a movement that followed it led to dramatic change. And you know, if you think about it, I think back to 47 years ago, there were no cameras.

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