During Monday’s Congressional Democrats' briefing, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) discussed President Trump's push back on the Supreme Court and law firms across the country.
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NewsTranscript
00:00I yield to my colleague and friend, Jamie Raskin.
00:03Thank you, Senator Schiff, and thank you for your leadership.
00:07It's been an honor to conduct this proceeding with you,
00:11with all these wonderful guests and everybody looking at the proceedings across America.
00:16And thank you to our great witnesses here.
00:19Ben Franklin once said, make yourself a sheep and the wolves will eat you.
00:25And you are for people who have not made yourselves into sheep.
00:28You've shown us how to stand tough and stand strong against tyranny and despotism.
00:37And you and all of my colleagues here are speaking today in the spirit of our Constitution.
00:46We have an anti-monarchical Constitution.
00:50We've got no kings here.
00:52We have the freedom of speech.
00:54We've got no queens here, no emperors here.
00:58And we have no slaves here, and we have no serfs here.
01:02Just people, citizens, all of us together,
01:06standing equally under the Equal Protection Clause.
01:11We have an anti-monarchical Constitution.
01:15It forbids titles of nobility.
01:18It was so important to the framers.
01:20Congress cannot award or recognize titles of nobility.
01:25We've got an anti-cruelty Constitution.
01:28The Eighth Amendment bans cruel and unusual punishment.
01:31We've got an anti-corruption Constitution.
01:34It guarantees due process to everyone.
01:37It guarantees equal protection under the laws,
01:41as well as freedom of speech and freedom of the press and free assembly,
01:45the right to petition government for redress of grievances,
01:48free exercise of religion,
01:49no establishment of religion.
01:52And so we say to the courts,
01:58as Ms. Cohen said,
02:00you're an important line of defense.
02:02I don't think that you're the last line of defense.
02:04I think the people will always be the last line of defense.
02:07But you're a significant line of defense for us right now.
02:10We have 68 court orders that have been rendered by federal district courts,
02:16preliminary injunctions and temporary restraining orders
02:19against all of the lawlessness that's taken place.
02:23And we hope that the U.S. Supreme Court,
02:26which we know Donald Trump bragged about having packed and stacked
02:31in order to overthrow Roe versus Wade and get the Dobbs decision.
02:36We know that the court may be in a different posture on some of these things,
02:40but we ask all of the justices to live their oaths of office
02:45to uphold the Constitution and the rule of law.
02:49I ask them, I ask everybody in Congress,
02:53I ask everybody in the country to go back and read the steel seizure case from 1952,
02:58where President Truman ordered the seizure of the steel mills
03:03in the middle of a war, in the middle of the Korean War.
03:06He said it was a national security crisis
03:08and we couldn't afford to have a strike and a standoff
03:12between the unions and the management.
03:14And so he just ordered that all of the steel mills be seized.
03:19And the Supreme Court came back with a remarkable decision saying,
03:24the president gets his power only from either the explicit text of the Constitution
03:30or from Congress.
03:33And Congress had already rejected the idea
03:36that the president should have the power to seize the steel mills.
03:39And so the court said, in a 6-3 decision,
03:43the Constitution doesn't grant you that power,
03:45and Congress forbade you that power.
03:48And Justice Jackson, in his famous concurrence,
03:51said, at that point, your power, Mr. President, is at its lowest ebb.
03:56But here's the remarkable thing about the decision,
03:58which is indeed the paradigm for interpreting executive power,
04:03as Justice Amy Coney Barrett said in her confirmation hearings over here in the Senate.
04:12The remarkable thing about the decision is that there were nine Democrats,
04:18most of them New Deal liberal Democrats,
04:20on the Supreme Court at that moment.
04:22President Roosevelt had been in for four terms.
04:26Truman had come in.
04:27These people, they were friends.
04:29A lot of the justices had served in the Roosevelt administration
04:33or in the Truman administration.
04:37Some had been in the Department of Justice.
04:40And in fact, the three justices in dissent
04:43taunted them saying,
04:45you said this was totally fine.
04:47You wanted this to be a power that the president would have.
04:50And now you're on the court and you're saying the president does have this power.
04:53But it was really their finest moment
04:55because they distinguished their roles as partisans
04:59when they were either in Congress or in the administration
05:01from their role as justices upholding the Constitution and the rule of law.
05:06And they said, despite the fact that this was their team,
05:11they could not allow the president to overstep his bounds in that way.
05:17And after the case was rendered,
05:21Justice Jackson was so nervous that President Truman would never speak to him again
05:25that he had a dinner party with all the justices
05:28and he invited President Truman to come over there.
05:33And there was a round of toasts.
05:36And Truman said to Justice Jackson,
05:38well, I don't know if I like your law that much,
05:41but this is a hell of a good bourbon you're serving us tonight.
05:44So we hope that the justices will live up to their titles.
05:50They're the only jurists in the federal system who get the title of justice.
05:56Everybody else is a judge.
05:57And we hope these justices will act with justice.
06:00And I want to just say finally about the law firms,
06:03because I've been working with Senator Blumenthal
06:05and with Ms. Scanlon on the question of the law firms.
06:09There is no safety in appeasement.
06:14There just is no safety in appeasement.
06:16These law firms have bargained away $40 million,
06:21tens of millions of dollars in pro bono assistance.
06:24Well, now, if Donald Trump gets to choose who your clients are going to be,
06:29right, and you're going to end up representing, I don't know,
06:32the National Rifle Association,
06:35the National Right to Life Committee,
06:36you name it, anti-environment, anti-LGBTQ, whatever it is.
06:42Now, not only are you going to have to put the resources of your firm
06:46into these causes on behalf of a president who just shook your firm down,
06:52but you're not going to be able to take any of the clients on the other side,
06:57because that's a conflict now.
06:59You are conflicted out of representing the pro-environment,
07:04the pro-choice groups, the unions,
07:06if you've taken the people on the other side.
07:09There is no safety in appeasing a tyrant.
07:13There's no safety in selling out.
07:16And these people are teaching us what the meaning of the rule of law really is.
07:21Ben Franklin said,
07:22we must all hang together or we will all hang separately.
07:27Let's hang together right now.
07:29Let's stand tall, America, for our constitution,
07:33our rule of law, and our democracy.
07:34And I yield back to you, Senator Schiff.