CNN Newsroom: Interview with Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-FL)

Interview

"A hundred percent. And I asked myself that same question after every mass shooting. And look, I've been involved in this movement since I was 15 years old. It was the Sandy Hook shooting that really drove me to action. I remember sitting in the concert hall, playing drums, and I was playing at a jazz concert, not being able to play correctly because I kept looking over my shoulder at the exit sign because I was scared someone would walk into my school and kill myself, kill my classmates and kill my family.

And that anxiety, it was an anxiety that young people and really all Americans live with on a daily basis where we lose 100 lives a day due to gun violence. That is a policy failure. And we have to rectify it. And what happened yesterday, not only the intersection of gun violence but gun violence and racism and bigotry. And here's the thing, I am not surprised that this happened because this last legislative session, we saw our governor and Republicans in the state legislature pushed horrible bigoted legislation, that empower shooters like the one we saw yesterday.

Things like permit-less carry that say you can pretty much carry any gun, any place, any person, any time. And bills and actions like we saw when we found out two weeks ago that middle schoolers would be learning that black people who were enslaved received personal benefit from them. All of these issues are connected and we have to do a lot more.

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I'd love to sit down with the governor. You know, we've been asking him to sit down, and activists and organizers have been asking him to travel the state and sit down with people since he's gotten into office and he never does it.

What I would tell him is, Governor, we need a special session on gun violence. We needed it, you know, when you first started and we need it now more than ever. The leading cause of death for children in this country is to be shot to death. That's unacceptable. Not only do we need a special session on gun violence but we also need the governor to stop embracing and being a champion for this far-right wing fascist movement that's growing in Florida and across the entire country because when he gives credence and when he embraces that movement, to help further his presidential primary run, he gives them the energy they need.

And we live in a time right now where the ways our leaders conduct themselves and the message they give, it's more important now more than ever and we need true leadership in the state, one of the most diverse states in the entire country. I love this state. You know, I was actually just thinking about writing an op-ed, and I want to still do it but now it's even harder. I wanted to write an op-ed encouraging people to still come to the state because we can't be left alone here.

We need help in this fight. And then yesterday, I get up and I look at my phone and I see that three people were hunted down because they were black. There's multiple truths to everything going on in the state but I want people to know that we're fighting.

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This just shows someone that's completely out of touch and also you know that the majority of people don't agree with the politics of your party, if one of your policy points is to make it harder to vote and make sure that less people vote. And let's be very clear, that is what that candidate and the entire Republican Party and their apparatus and leadership, that's what they want to do because they understand that, number one, in 2022, 70 percent of Gen Z and young millennials voted for Democrats.

And so it's no surprise that the right-wing now is more than ever wants to raise the voting age, wants to -- he also wants to do testing to vote. It's so un-American to take away that freedom that we have. Voting should be one of the easiest things to do in this country and that fight is still alive and still well. We should want more people to vote, not less, and again, it shows that the right-wing, they understand that their policy is not popular.

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Well, we were really -- we were saddened to see the Supreme Court decision but many of us really expected it. And we're happy to see that the president, within 24 hours, came out and said here's the next plan, we're going to do this through the Higher Education Act. And now they're going through a rulemaking process.

What that letter did, and I signed it with Senator Elizabeth Warren, Representative Ayanna Pressley, Chuck Schumer, a bunch of us signed it, and says, number one, thank you, Mr. President, for your work on doing this through the Higher Education Act, but let's ensure that the bureaucracy of the rulemaking process doesn't inhibit us from giving -- from doing the student debt relief as soon as possible.

We'd like to see this redone early next year. And let's be clear, this is a racial justice issue, this is an issue of our economy, this is to take the shackles off of not just young people but the over 40 million of folks who would be eligible under the program. And it's really important that we get this promise done for the American people, especially early next year. Folks are not in crushing student debt because they lived beyond their means. It's because they've been denied the means to live. And we as legislators have to use every tool in our toolbox to give the relief that they deserve.

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Thanks for having me.

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