Trump’s Military Invasion Is Coming | Rep. Jamie Raskin

I have warned you before and now Donald Trump is saying it. He wants to be a dictator. Representative Jamie Raskin is here to discuss. Welcome back to Defending Democracy. I'm Mark Elias. But please make sure to like and subscribe and hit the bell

to make sure you get notified whenever we post a new video. Congressman Jamie Raskin, welcome back to Defending Democracy.

I'm delighted to be with you, Mark, and I got to thank you for your participation in Democracy Summer. You were a favorite of more than 1,000 young people across the country, and now we've got hundreds of young people who want to become election lawyers fighting for democracy, like Mark.

Yes, well, it was great to do it. And for those of you who don't know, Congressman Raskin, rather than raising money and spending it so that he could win by 85% rather than 82% of the vote or whatever it is. He raises campaign money and raises money to train a core of young people to be engaged in politics,

be engaged in elections, be engaged in issues. It's a great program he runs every summer called Democracy Summer, and I was happy to speak at it. And thank you, Congressman, for running it. So you know, it's one of these things where once might be an accident, but twice can never, you know, twice is never an accident.

So on Monday, he said, a lot of people are saying maybe we'd like a dictator. So you know, that kind of perked my ears up because honestly I don't think I've ever run across anyone who has said maybe we'd like a dictator. And then on Tuesday, earlier today, he had a cabinet meeting which by the way would have made Kim Jong-un blush. I mean it was like literally one cabinet official after another saying how great he is. I mean Whitkoff saying that there's never been a better candidate for a Nobel Prize in the history of the prize.

The Labor secretary, I forget her name, saying she had draped a huge banner picture of him on the side of the building because he was like the greatest president ever. Anyway, but he again mused about this idea that, you know, people may like a dictator because he's tough on crime. And, you know, what do you what do you make of him, his floating, being a dictator because he's tough on crime. And, you know, what do you make of him, his floating being a dictator?

Well, we remember he said during the campaign that he wanted to be dictator on day one. And he's flirted with that language for a long time. You know, in some sense, we shouldn't play into it because all we need to know is that our constitution does not allow it.

We have a president whose job is to take care of the laws faithfully executed and the constitution is supreme. We don't have a supreme leader. What's interesting to me psychologically, Mark, is that it's at his points of weakness

and there's growing weakness in this administration. His poll numbers are tanking. He looks ridiculous on a number of fronts, including tariffs. But it's during moments like that when he wants to use that language, he would like people to say he's like a dictator because it makes him seem strong. I mean, he's as much like a clown as he's like a dictator.

Yeah.

So you turned me on to a really important concept that we don't have three equal branches, co-equal branches of government. As you point out, co-equal is not even a word. That really, the founders intended Congress to be supreme. And I want to pick up on what you just said about, you know, that the Constitution doesn't allow it. Tell me if I'm wrong, you're the constitutional scholar and professor and expert here. The Constitution was the product of the United States

being formed by colonies that revolted against the dictator. Wasn't the great fear that the founders had that we would devolve into a dictatorship? So like literally the entire purpose of the Constitution is to not allow us to have a dictator.

Absolutely right. I mean, the world's first constitutional democracy was conceived in revolutionary insurgency against a king, against monarchy, against the union of church and state, against the Lords and feudalism and so on. And we, you know, the brave founders

like Tom Paine and John Adams and Samuel Adams and Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin, they thought that this was the most dangerous thing. And that's embodied in the Constitution. You know, when, you know, my colleagues fall into that fifth grade fallacy of saying three co-equal branches of government,

they can never explain why does Congress have the power to impeach, try, convict, remove, and permanently disqualify from federal office a president, and he doesn't have the power to impeach, try, convict, remove and disqualify us, right? It's because the founders of the country were seriously afraid of what a mad king,

hell bent on wars of vanity and conceit and imperial ambition could do to everybody. That's why Congress has the power to declare war. That's why we've got the power over the budgets. We've got the power over taxes. Trump is the first president to dare to say he could just impose tariffs on his own.

Tariffs have always been adopted by Congress. He's citing federal statute in IEPA, the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, which doesn't even mention tariffs, which is why he got struck down by the Court of International Trade. And I hope he's going to lose all the way up to the Supreme Court on this. He keeps irrigating powers to himself that don't belong to him, that belong to the people's representatives because as Madison put it,

Congress is the preeminent branch of government. The president's job is to take care that the laws are faithfully executed.

So one last question on this, because it is something I get asked a lot about in real life and I also get a lot of questions at Democracy Docket about this. So, if Congress passes a budget and says, go spend $100 on a widget, how does Donald Trump have the authority

to not spend the $100 on the widget? And is it, you know, is it because Congress passed a law in 1970-something or other that said it? Or could presidents never do that? Sort out for us, what is the power of the president to not faithfully execute the law?

The president has no power not to faithfully execute the laws. That's what the president's job is, to take care that the laws are faithfully executed.

So then what's this whole debate about with this?

Okay, so you're sure the debate...

With the law and everything?

Well, I mean, there's really not much of a debate. I mean, the president does keep losing on all of this. He has no power to just impound federal money because he disagrees with it. He has no power just to unilaterally rescind a budget expenditure. He does have a statutory power to come back to Congress to request rescission, to say that there have been

whatever substantial changes in the circumstances, the facts on the ground, and he's asking Congress to rescind the money. But that remains Congress's decision, not his decision. And if it doesn't happen in compliance with that statute, it can't happen, which is why, as you know, there have been more than 375 cases brought against us.

And we have more than 200 temporary restraining orders and preliminary injunctions that have been issued by judges from the most conservative in the land to the most liberal in the land saying, no, you have to go ahead and implement the law that's been passed by the House, passed by the Senate and signed into law by a president. And the president does have the power to veto. That veto can be overridden. But once it's been signed into law or overridden into law, the president has a very simple job, which is to execute it.

That's the president's job, not to legislate. And that's very clear from Article 1 of the Constitution. The very first sentence that comes after the preamble says all legislative power is vested in a Congress of the United States.

So I want to ask you about what is happening with Donald Trump and American cities. And I want to broaden this from the discussion that I see in so many places, which is really about Washington, DC. And don't get me wrong, you work in Washington, DC.

I work in Washington, DC. Both of us live around Washington, DC. So what is happening there is an absolute travesty, in my estimation, in my opinion. But I think it is wrong for people to think that Donald Trump only wants to deploy the National Guard

and the military in Washington, D.C. And we know this because actually the first city he sent in the National Guard, the first city in which he sent in the Marines was actually Los Angeles. And you know, we're seeing him have a back and forth now with Chicago.

He has mentioned New York. And you know, I don't think that this ends with just Washington, D.C. or even those cities. I think this is part of an effort by Donald Trump to put U.S. military, National Guard in blue cities. I think this is part of an effort by Donald Trump to put U.S. military National Guard in blue cities. And I you know, we can talk about why that is. I think it relates in part to the twenty twenty six elections. But talk to us a little bit, both as a member of Congress, as a student of American history and constitutional law and also of politics.

What do you make of this effort by him? What is he trying to achieve? What ground does he stand on? And do you agree with me that you think this spreads much, much further?

Well, I do want to come back at the end, Mark, to where you began, which is the elections next year, because I think ultimately this is his objective and his destination, which is to create a series of crises and pretexts for intervention that would allow him to alter the course of his electoral destiny. Right now he's going down. I mean, they threw 17 million people

off of Medicaid health care. You know, it doesn't really kick in until after the election, but everybody understands there are already rural hospitals closing. It's totally changed the health sector already.

They threw 20 million people off of their SNAP nutrition benefits. So they understand that his popularity is sinking like a stone right now. So ultimately this is about the elections. But if we look at it as an historical and a legal and a judicial matter, there are all kinds of boundaries that are being destroyed by what he's done.

One is that we don't use the military for law enforcement purposes. That's the meaning of the Posse Comitatus Act. That is a sacred principle to our revolution and our constitution. We don't believe in a standing army

that can threaten the liberties something that the right used to insist on, although they've all grown mum on it right now. So that's one major problem. Another is that the president is completely collapsing the difference between what's federal and what's local.

And the DC is a great example of that because the Home Rule Charter for DC from 1973 says that the president has the power not to take over the police department, but to direct the mayor take over the police department, but to direct the mayor to make the police department available for the purposes of addressing a federal interest

where police are needed. A great example of that would actually be a violent insurrection at the Capitol, precisely where Trump did not try to get the police involved or send in the National Guard. He did everything in his power to prevent that from happening. But in any event, that would be an example

of a real federal interest. Another would be the protection of a prime minister who's in town and they need eight squad cars or whatever. Okay, but Trump says, no, I'm gonna take over the police department, which he has no statutory power to do. has not been given that power by Congress under the Home Rule Act.

And he says, I'm going to do that in order to clean up the graffiti, the filthy graffiti in the filthy streets and the blight of homelessness. These are not federal interests as contemplated by the Congress and the D.C. Home Rule Act or by the Constitution itself. These are local interests. And so he really kind of obliterates

that distinction there. And he's been doing that all across the country by trying to militarize the cities and then deploying the military for law enforcement purposes, which is not what they're trained to do.

They're trained to be war fighters and not to go enforce laws against graffiti or jaywalking or whatever it might be. So it's a mess what he's done. I think that the silver lining here, Mark, is that it's created a very positive political backlash

across the country where the mayors and the council members and the people of these cities and towns are saying, this is ridiculous. And they're getting sympathy from people in other municipalities saying, look, crime is at a 30 year low in the District of Columbia. Homicide is down in Baltimore and in Chicago and so on. The mayors and councils actually have stuff to teach Donald Trump about crime fighting. But the fact is, under American federalism, if you want to get everybody together, great. That's when it works best, when the feds are working with the states and working with the

localities to try to fight crime, have a summit on what's working around the country. How are these mayors actually effectuating such a major reduction in homicide? They've got some really interesting techniques they've been using. We should be sharing those rather than just bringing in the National Guard from South Carolina or Mississippi to D.C. or hypothetically Baltimore or Chicago. I mean, in D.C. they've been hanging around Union Station or the Washington Monument

and taking pictures, which is, you know, nice and everything, but that's not a crime-fighting strategy. And in fact, a lot of people are starting to say that Trump knew that crime has gone down so dramatically around the country, and he just wants to be able to take credit for it by sending the National Guard for a few days.

Yeah, so I want to pick up the point that you mentioned at the beginning about elections, because my view is that Donald Trump is desperate to undermine free and fair elections in 2026. That everyone who looks for a unifying theory for Donald Trump, and they try to find it in tariffs or trade or crime or whatever, it's all a bunch of bullshit. Like, Donald Trump has no core belief on anything. The only thing that has motivated his political career is power. And it is the escalating use of force and threat and coercion of unsavory tactics,

because he is viewing down and the unpopular polls, the cutting of healthcare, the sort of decadence and corruption of his administration. And he's afraid he's gonna lose control of Congress in 2026. And if he loses control of Congress, the difference between Jamie Raskin having a gavel

and, you know, some Republican having a gavel is for Donald Trump night and day. I mean, it's also night and day for the American people. But from Donald Trump's narrow interests of keeping power, it's a really big deal. Why is he saying he's going to ban mail-in voting? You know, I was asked by Chris Hayes why he said, you know, what's behind the strategy of Donald Trump banning mail-in voting?

And I without missing a beat, I just said, because the Democrats vote more by mail. Like you know, like it's not any more complicated than that. The reason why you don't want to ban mail-in voting is because Democrats use mail-in voting more than Republicans.

That's not exactly an Agatha Christie mystery.

Correct. Exactly. It's not three-dimensional chess. It's not even chess. It's barely tic-tac-toe. I mean, like it's that's what that's the game that Donald Trump is playing. And he has targeted unspecified voting equipment. I'll tell you what voting equipment he's going to target.

He will specify the voting equipment when he finds out what voting equipment is used in Baltimore, what voting equipment is used in Detroit, what voting equipment is used in Atlanta, what voting equipment is used in Charlotte, right? He will target the voting equipment that is used in blue cities because he doesn't want Democrats voting. And to your point, and this is maybe the most controversial part, but you opened the door

on this, I want to go back to it, is I think he wants to deploy federal law enforcement, surge federal law enforcement, and also deploy the National Guard and perhaps active military in blue cities because he thinks it will help him win the election. And I don't mean that by being tough on crime. I mean by intimidating voters and engaging in tactics that, frankly, you tell me, I'm not sure this country's ever seen, you know.

Well, well, remember, the Republican National Committee itself was subject to a number of consent decrees and judicial orders precisely because they were sending people who looked like.

Yeah, they were doing privatized. So this was 19, for people who don't know, this is the, this was the, this originated in the gubernatorial election in 1983 in New Jersey, where they sent off duty police officers and others dressed as, wearing patches that said election integrity officials, and they engaged in harassment of Black

and Latino voters at the polls. But here, we're actually talking about not people pretending to be, we're actually talking about people who are in the military or the National Guard.

I mean, that was like a Cub Scout picnic compared to what's going on now. But the point is that this has been, you know, voter intimidation and voter suppression have been strategies for a long time on the Republican side. And we should say also it was a strategy on the Democratic side when the Dixie crats were running the Democratic Party with stuff like the white primary and, you know,

the grandfather clauses and literacy tests and poll taxes and so on. But the Republican Party today, very clearly, has picked up the mantle of political white supremacy and trying to intimidate people who they think are not gonna vote for them. So I agree 1000% with your analysis

that ultimately Donald Trump is thinking tactically about getting into the new year and what he's gonna do in order to demoralize and fragment and intimidate and thwart the vote of people who are not gonna vote for him. is that it's not completely about power,

it's about power and wealth. And in some sense, you could say the power is to protect the money-making operation, which is at the heart of Trump enterprises. I mean, this is a guy who has earned something like 3.7 or 3.8 billion dollars, billion dollars,

since he's been in office. I mean, that's extraordinary. So staying in office, yes, is part of the plan for continuing to rake in this kind of money and then protecting it.

Yeah, look, I think this is part of the reason why, and I've observed this before. I think that, look, I think there are a lot of Democrats who are fighting and who are standing up to Donald Trump and doing a great job. You first and foremost. You know, I think Gavin Newsom, what he's doing is great. But I think the guy who actually gets in Donald Trump's head more

than anyone else is actually J.P. Pritzker, because he stands up and fights against him. But Donald Trump looks at someone and says, OK, this guy is really rich. And like he didn't make it by grifting money from his supporters. Do you ever be like it's not it's not the product of like shaking down the Emirates for a plane? Do you know what I mean? Like it's it's and I so I think Trump actually in a weird way is kind of intimidated by people who are genuinely wealthy, where the money.

Well, we all have a mark, you know, right.

Good example, yeah. I'll be right back with more of my conversation with Congressman Jamie Raskin in a moment. But you know, I started Democracy Docket in 2020 because I knew there needed to be a reliable, informative, pro-democracy place for you to learn

about what's happening to democracy in court and around the country. Now that the Trump administration has turned the Department of Justice into a weapon that it's using against its political opponents,

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to keep you informed about the fights ahead.

A lot of bowing and scraping going on there, but there's also a sense of competitive rivalry too. And then in the end, he began threatening, you know, Elon Musk's access to these massive government contracts, which of course have been central to his wealth maximization plan.

Now, now I noticed in the the other thing I want to say about this voter suppression is in the statement that he posted on social media, I guess his social media post, whatever you call it, from last weekend. This is going back a little bit where he talked about bailing, banning mail and voting, which was the thing that most people

picked up on. The thing that got me really worried was further down in that post. He said that the states are the agents of the federal government for counting and tabulating votes, and that the president speaks for the federal government.

So first of all, this all seemed cockeyed because like, I don't think the state, I mean, it is a historic and unconstitutional to consider these states to be the age of the federal government, but ultimately what he was focusing on

was that he can direct them how to tabulate and count votes.

Well, you know, if a democratic president had said that, the Republicans would be calling for impeachment right now, that the states are mere instrumentalities of the federal government for the purposes of ballot tabulation or any other purpose. The Supreme Court itself has said that the federal government may not commandeer the personnel and the machinery of the state government for the purposes of law enforcement or any other purpose. The states have their own intrinsic political integrity

and constitutional juridical existence. Okay, so Donald Trump was totally wrong about that. And also, again, Congress is the lawmaking power for the federal government, not the president. Congress has the power to engage in regulation of elections for purposes of time, place, and manner and other purposes, not the president of the United States.

He can only implement the laws that we pass. He really has no role in the whole process.

Yeah, I want to unpack a couple of pieces of that just to clear up for people who might be worried, one not worried, we're all worried, might be wondering about the constitutional piece of this. So correct me if I'm wrong, but it was the states that created the federal government, not the other way around, right? The constitutional convention was-

Well, I would go with, I'd go with Lincoln on this. So the people created it, we the people, United States. So the people created the national government and made the US Constitution and federal laws supreme over state and local and so on. But everybody's got an independent place.

And there are certain things the feds can't do that the states can. And obviously, certain things the feds can do

that the states cannot do. But the states, there are in the Constitution principles of federalism that give the states broad authorities. I think it's the 10th Amendment that delegates authority to them,

that is not, you know, and to the people. That, you know, the states were not created to be agents of the federal government. The states, you know, have their own existence separate from the federal government.

Absolutely right. The states were not created as instrumentalities for the federal government. Absolutely right. The states were not created as instrumentalities for the federal government. And the reason why we have a president and an executive branch is to implement federal laws because it's not up to the states to implement federal laws.

And then my other question for you, or not a question but comment and clarification, is you mentioned the elections clause. So the elections clause basically says that states, in the first instance, at the time, place a matter of elections. But Congress, through legislation,

can essentially override. So in the first instance, we let states run elections in this country. We don't have a national body of elections. We have state-run elections. Actually, in a lot of states, they're county or locality-run elections. But Congress can decide, for example, to set a uniform day

for elections or requiring that military and overseas voters can vote by mail. Like, Congress can decide, you know what, states, what states we're gonna make you in connection with federal elections, do certain things to make sure that we have uniform elections. There is nothing, that is in, as I recall, that is in Article I, which is the part about Congress.

There is nothing in there that even mentions the president.

No, Article I, Section 4 just says, look, the states can set the time and the place and manner of elections, but that can be subject to regulation by Congress. And for different purposes, like I think you mentioned, the Overseas Citizens and Uniformed Services

Voting Rights Act, right? To make sure that armed service members abroad have the right to vote and participate. And this has been part of what gave Congress the power to pass the Voting Rights Act, Section 5 of the 14th Amendment. And also this section can deal with some of the technical and mechanical issues around

voting. But the president has no power to, a lot of people ask the question, well, can the president just nullify or dissolve the elections? No, he has no power to, a lot of people ask the question, well, can the president just nullify or dissolve the elections? No, he has no power over that at all. And remember, his job is to take care

that the laws are faithfully executed. Sometimes people say, well, he's commander in chief of the country. Actually, he's not commander in chief of the country or of the government, he's commander in chief of the army and the Navy and the militias in times of actual service.

That's the president's job. If you're a textualist as I am, if you believe in the language of the Constitution.

Yeah, all right. So I want to ask you about redistricting, which also implicates state power and, in theory, congressional power over districting. I say in theory, congressional power over redistricting. I say in theory because, you know, for all of your Republican colleagues now from California and some of them from New York, who all of a sudden don't like the idea of mid-cycle

redistricting and don't like the idea that maps might be drawn with partisan effects, these folks all voted against the Freedom to Vote Act and the For the People Act and the John R. Lewis Voting Advancement Act. And those laws, particularly the Freedom to Vote Act and the For the People Act, would have banned, would have set up a national system that would have prevented everybody in every state from engaging in the kinds of practices that Texas is and that now that

Republicans, some Republicans who are in the crosshairs of this are now objecting to. So you've seen obviously what's happened in Texas. For people who need a clarification, the president ordered up a new map in the state of Texas and Greg Abbott gladly accommodated

by calling a special session and the Republicans in that state then enacted what can only be described as a gross gerrymander. That is a racial gerrymander. It targets Black and Hispanic voters. It violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

It is also, in my view, violates the Constitution in the way in which they did mid-cycle redistricting. My law firm filed a lawsuit the morning after the evening that the state Senate passed the map making all of those claims. And then we've seen California move in through a ballot initiative at the behest of the governor there to essentially offset that, create a ballot measure that if it passes will likely result

in a more democratic map. So, as we sit here today, that's the state of play. There are states, including your home state of Maryland, where the governor has said he might do something. There's one Republican seat in Maryland. There are, Donald Trump is leaning hard

on Missouri and Florida and Indiana. There is of course, Ohio, which Republicans control. So like, we got a lot of moving pieces. What do you, how do you think about this and how do you sort it out?

Well, as you say, the Democrats, I am proud to say, have been the ones who've been trying to overthrow the gerrymander system, the system where politicians choose their voters before the voters ever get to choose their politicians. And so it renders democracy a pretty hollow exercise in most of the country right now. We tried to get rid of that in the, for the People Act, it was the very first plank

to mandate independent nonpartisan redistricting commissions all over the country, not allowing elected officials to serve on those commissions. That's the only people who decide right now is elected officials, and we're saying, take them out,

move to independent redistricting commission. Now, for reasons that I can elaborate, if you wanna go down this road, I don't think that's enough. I think we need to mandate multi-member districts and use a method of proportional representation,

like rank choice voting. So that, yes, some Republicans could get elected to Congress from Massachusetts. And yes, some Republicans could get elected to Congress from Massachusetts and yes And Democrats could get elected to Congress from Utah We shouldn't have you know states that are all one thing or all the other based on gerrymandering, right? but in any event, the first step has got to be the process step of Moving to the independent redistricting panels.

Now, a number of states have done that. Those are all blue states. Right. California is one of them. And so in dragging us down to the to this race to the bottom, the GOP in Texas is turning the clock backwards further. I mean, California is showing the way,

let's have an independent, nonpartisan redistricting process. Texas says, not only do we wanna have the bare knuckle rugby match of partisan warriors every 10 years, we wanna do it every two years. We want hunger games nonstop,

so we can use not just computers, but artificial intelligence.

That's right.

To determine exactly where our voters are and then maximize the number of seats we can squeeze out of Texas, as Trump put it, or any other state. I mean, it could not be more explicit or naked than it is right now with what Texas is doing. And so this means that the districts become less competitive

and the overall delegations become less representative and we end up having less democracy. But I've said we've tried to fight fire with water for many terms of Congress. And the arsonists in the Republican Party keep burning it down.

And so at this point, what else can we do but fight fire with fire? I don't even think there's anything remotely ethical about saying, yes, we'll just let them become a permanent majority, not just in these gerrymandered state legislatures

where they keep drawing themselves into power, even where you've got a popular majority against them. But we're going to allow them now to just draw themselves into a permanently gerrymandered majority in the House of Representatives? I mean, I don't think we can do that. I don't think there's anything that is politically or morally or ethically indicated about doing that. We've got to fight fire with fire and try to make sure that the majority gets represented.

What else can we do? And then when we take Congress back, we can try to move the country forward by getting a larger bipartisan consensus behind reform.

Yeah, the bills that would have improved voting, would have improved voter registration, would have made significant improvements into election administration, things that are just like common sense, that are actually not even disagree,

that Republican election officials want, and that would have ended the scourge and what you call the race to the bottom with redistricting. Those were all provisions in a bill that was, that Democrats put together,

that Democrats put, I think it was the first bill of the session, H.R.1. Yeah. And it, and the first, and Democrats in the House all voted for it, and Republicans all opposed it. Like every one of the Republicans opposed it.

You know, I always say this when people say yeah But it died didn't it die because Democrats in the Senate were unable to overcome the filibuster I always say before you blame the Democrats Why did they have to overcome a filibuster? Like why weren't there Republicans willing to vote for this bill? They weren't willing to vote for it in the house they weren't willing to vote for in the Senate and

Like we I feel like Congressman we have a culture problem here. Like there is a culture problem in that Republicans just won't vote. Your colleagues in the House, they just won't support these basic democracy measures when, you know, it wasn't that long ago that they were voting for HAVA, the Help America Vote Act.

They were voting voting for the MOVE Act, which is a voting rights act. And of course, and the crown jewel, I was about to say, and what Ronald Reagan called the crown jewel of American democracy was passed overwhelmingly by Republican presidents and Republican Congresses in 1982, in 2006. What do we do to break the culture problem, as I call it, that has gripped your colleagues that doesn't allow them to support any of these things

that we're talking about?

Well, this is the problem of Donald Trump. I mean, Trump could not even understand what you're saying, Mark. I mean, it doesn't make sense to him to say, everybody in democracy has the right to vote. And we want legislative delegations that are going to be

roughly proportional of the people. And we want a democratic system that's open to everybody. All of his rhetoric, all of it is about how we're going to crush you and you guys are evil and we're going to destroy you and so on. I mean, we've never had a president like that before. And suddenly it saturates the Republican Party.

All of them just go along with it. So, you know, you pose the question of essentially how we're going to restore American democracy. And the reason why it's such a tough situation for my party is we've got to be both a political party fighting the win at the same time that we are representing the country

in trying to defend constitutional democracy itself, the institutions and the mechanisms of democracy. But to my mind, the way we do that is we don't believe, or we should not believe that when we say we're defending democracy, we're defending a static collection of institutions. We've got to think of it as a project, something in motion. Tocqueville saw this in Democracy in America.

He said that democracy and voting rights in America are either shrinking and shriveling away, or they're growing and they're expanding. We've got to get back on the growth track. And that means a constitutional amendment on the right to vote.

That means getting rid of gerrymandering, getting rid of voter suppression. It means statehood. And I'm not talking about Greenland and Canada and Panama, Washington, DC and Puerto Rico. I'm talking about millions of American citizens

who are locked out of effective legislative participation and representation. You know, and I got to be the floor leader for the D.C. Statehood Bill, which we passed in the House in the 116th and 117th Congresses, and I worked with Eleanor Holmes Norton on that.

And, you know, when I got up, I was very proud. I said, look, I want wanna salute the 713,000 tax-paying draftable citizens of Washington, DC, because they have a bona fide, authentic, political grievance against Congress, but they didn't come down here

and beat the hell out of our police officers and wound them and injure them and disable them and give them strokes and heart attacks. They did it the right way. They petitioned for statehood admission. And we should admit them the way that 37 states

were admitted in the past. And the same thing with three and a half million Americans in Puerto Rico who need to be admitted. And we need the people in Puerto Rico, in Washington to keep democracy moving forward in the country.

All right. I got to ask you before, I got limited time with you because you've been very generous, but I've got to ask you before you go. We just had a big victory for rule of law in the state of Maryland. Now I feel a little sheepish saying it's a big victory for democracy because it was a ludicrous idea that the Trump administration

tried. So just to summarize, essentially Donald Trump's Department of Justice was acting in bad faith with handling what are called habeas petitions. These are petitions by people who were being threatened with being sent out of the United States into foreign gulags, like we saw what happened to the Venezuelans who were sent to El Salvador.

And so district court judges around the country who have to hear these habeas petitions, these emergency petitions to prevent these removals, were sort of tearing their hair out because when these petitions were filed, rather than the Department of Justice

doing what a sensible Department of Justice does, which is to slow the process down, to let judges have an opportunity to hear these cases, the Department of Justice was doing the opposite. They were speeding things up to rush these people outside so that then they could turn to the federal judge and say, too bad, Your Honor, too late, you moved too slow. So the chief judge in the District of Maryland, the federal court in Maryland, issued a what is a routine non-controversial thing. It's a standing order, sometimes people refer to them as local

rules, that basically said any time a habeas petition is filed in this district, which is statewide in Maryland, 48 hours has to go by before the government can remove the person. Right? Why 48 hours? Because the judge wasn't trying to jam the Department of Justice, wasn't trying to hold this up. They just said, the judge just said,

look, we need 48 hours to just hear the case, to read the pleadings, get a response, like have a little, hold a hearing, figure out what's going on. And what Donald Trump's Department of Justice did next is an absolute fucking outrage. It is not business as usual. It is completely aberrational,

which is rather than appealing the order to say the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, right? Rather than saying, your honor, we think you overstepped, which he hasn't, but we think you've overstepped, we're gonna appeal this order

through one of these habeas cases. They sued the judges. They sued the chief judge. They sued every judge. Like, here's the thing, everyone, you don't get to sue judges. Okay, if you don't like the outcome to a case, you don't get to sue the judges. But that's what the Department of Justice did. My only fault for the way this was handled is I thought the judges should just throw this lawsuit out and not even humor it.

Instead, they handed it to another judge from a different district to hear the case as if it's a real thing. By the way, a judge appointed by Donald Trump, and he threw it out and he excoriates the Department of Justice for this. I am of two minds here, Congressman. On the one hand, I am pleased by the results. On the other hand, I swear we're going to lose our democracy

if we treat as normal the absolutely aberrant behavior of Donald Trump and this Department of Justice. What do you think?

Well, yeah, I mean, look, this is why the opinion from Judge Cullen is so beautiful because, I mean, it's a systematic and rather rapid demolition of the idea that there's anything to the government just suing all of the judges in their personal capacity. And he said, you know, that's not how judicial immunity works. That's not how the separation of powers works. It's almost like he was tutoring a first year law student

who came in and says, oh, well, if you don't like the opinion of the judge, you sue the judge. No, that's not how it works. You appeal the judge to the next level of the judicial system that you're in.

But what I loved about it was that, as you say, it was an excoriating, withering opinion because he basically said, this is not how our system works. Somebody should understand that there, stop personalizing everything.

And you know, this is what they do. I mean, they've lost a whole, you know, in the district court who were appointed by Republicans as well as Democrats, and then they wanna impeach the judges. I mean, we spent the early part of this year

trying to defend judges against the claim that they should be impeached. I had colleagues in the House office buildings who have wanted posters up of federal judges. Yeah, and some Republican appointees, including Judge Boasberg,

the chief judge of the District Court in the District of Columbia, who first got the Brero Garcia case in the case of...

Don't they realize that they're putting these people's lives at risk?

I'm sure they must, because they've been told that repeatedly, and judges get all kinds of death threats, and they know it because members of Congress get death threats too. But we looked at the history of impeachments. Only 15 federal judges have been impeached in the entire sweep of American history, and it's always for things like taking bribes

or kickbacks or corruption or income tax evasion. They wanna impeach these judges because they disagree with their opinion, and their opinion is just indisputably magisterial and correct. They will never tell you what was wrong with Judge Boasberg's opinion.

They just don't like the fact that he disagreed with the administration.

All right, well, if only you could find a politician in Washington, DC who seems to be taking bribes and kickbacks who deserves impeachment. Maybe when you have a gavel back

in your hand, you'll take that one up. Yes, indeed. Well, I would say that those conditions are necessary, but they're not

sufficient. I understand. I understand.

But we are vigilant, indeed. We are on the case.

Yes. Congressman Raskin, it is always a pleasure to have you. You are a mensch, a scholar, a great representative for your constituents, and a good friend.

Well, thank you, Mark, for being a great lawyer

for the people, and keep at it, brother. letters to stay informed on the latest voting rights and election news. Also subscribe to this video, like it and share it. And please leave a comment. I read them and really like to hear back what you think we are doing well and I read them and really like to hear back what you think we are doing well and what we can do to improve. We'll see you next time.