Schiff and Raskin Launch Blistering Attack on Donald Trump

[0:00] Everyone in this room grew up in a period since World War II where we were used to seeing [0:06] a world that was ever-increasing in its freedoms. [0:09] We saw walls come down. [0:11] We saw new nations born. [0:13] We saw the ever-greater ability to express ourselves, to practice our faith, to associate [0:21] with whom we would, and we came to believe it was inexorable. [0:24] We came to believe that it was like the laws of gravity. [0:28] Or it was, as Martin Luther King said, the moral arc of the universe always bending towards [0:32] justice until all of a sudden it wasn't bending towards justice. [0:38] And we've come to realize, much to our shock, that there's nothing inevitable about this. [0:43] There's nothing inevitable about democracy or democratization, that this experiment in [0:50] this country, this great experiment, self-governance, now two and a half centuries old, is not inevitable. [0:57] It was improbable at its start. [1:00] And we've witnessed something we never would have imagined in this country. [1:03] We have witnessed with incredible rapidity the creation of a climate of fear by this administration. [1:13] We see universities afraid to speak out to defend their own students, to defend their [1:20] own academic freedom. [1:24] You see universities rushing to make deals with the administration. [1:28] You see universities cowed into silence, not stepping up to defend other universities. [1:34] You see members of the press excluded from public events because they don't use the administration's [1:40] favored parlance. [1:43] And you don't see other members of the press in solidarity with them. [1:48] You see law firms rush to cut separate deals. [1:53] You see lawyers purged from the Department of Justice. [1:58] You see FBI agents purged from the Bureau. [2:00] You see scientists purged from their agencies. [2:04] A wholesale effort to weed out and drive out anyone of independent thinking, anyone who will [2:13] stand up and defend the rule of law or science or the freedom of thought or expression, right [2:21] down to ordinary citizens who are now afraid. [2:26] If the government of the United States can pluck a man off the street and send him to a prison [2:31] in El Salvador without any kind of due process or any process whatsoever, then no one is safe. [2:42] And if the government's response to that is to discipline a lawyer who dares to speak [2:48] the truth to a court, then no one is safe. [2:55] And the answer to this climate of fear, there really is only one answer, and you're seeing [3:01] it today, and that is courage. [3:04] We must demonstrate courage in the face of this fear. [3:08] In this very committee room where one liked it, Joseph McCarthy and his allies made the [3:15] country afraid and caused people to inform on each other and betray each other, allowed [3:24] people to be driven out of the government and to be persecuted. [3:32] And we wondered how that could be. [3:35] We wondered how could so many people be complicit. [3:40] Well, now we know. [3:42] Now we know. [3:43] Now we have witnessed it in our own time. [3:45] But I will say this of the brave witnesses who have come and testified today. [3:53] All of the rest of us have to ask ourselves, looking back at the McCarthy era, what would [4:00] we have done? [4:01] What would we have done if we were faced with the loss of our jobs, if we were faced with [4:08] the loss of our livelihood, if we were faced with the loss of our position? [4:13] What would we have done? [4:14] Well, you don't have to ask that question. [4:19] Your being here is all the answer anyone could demand. [4:24] And we are deeply, deeply grateful to you. [4:28] I yield to my colleague and friend, Jamie Raskin. [4:31] Thank you, Senator Schiff. [4:33] And thank you for your leadership. [4:36] It's been an honor to conduct this proceeding with you, with all these wonderful guests and [4:41] everybody looking at the proceedings across America. [4:44] And thank you to our great witnesses here. [4:48] Ben Franklin once said, make yourself a sheep and the wolves will eat you. [4:53] And you are for people who have not made yourselves into sheep. [4:57] You've shown us how to stand tough and stand strong against tyranny and despotism. [5:05] And you and all of my colleagues here are speaking today in the spirit of our constitution. [5:15] We have an anti-monarchical constitution. [5:18] We've got no kings here. [5:20] We have the freedom of speech. [5:23] We've got no queens here, no emperors here. [5:27] And we have no slaves here and we have no serfs here. [5:31] Us people, citizens, all of us together, standing equally under the equal protection clause. [5:40] We have an anti-monarchical constitution. [5:44] It forbids titles of nobility. [5:47] It was so important to the framers. [5:49] Congress cannot award or recognize titles of nobility. [5:53] We've got an anti-cruelty constitution. [5:57] The Eighth Amendment bans cruel and unusual punishment. [6:00] We've got an anti-corruption constitution. [6:03] It guarantees due process to everyone. [6:06] It guarantees equal protection under the laws. [6:10] As well as freedom of speech and freedom of the press and free assembly, the right to [6:14] petition government for redress of grievances, free exercise of religion, no establishment [6:20] of religion. [6:22] And so we say to the courts, as Ms. Cohen said, you're an important line of defense. [6:30] I don't think that you're the last line of defense. [6:32] I think the people will always be the last line of defense. [6:36] But you're a significant line of defense for us right now. [6:39] We have 68 court orders that have been rendered by federal district courts, preliminary injunctions [6:45] and temporary restraining orders against all of the lawlessness that's taken place. [6:50] And we hope that the U.S. Supreme Court, which we know Donald Trump bragged about having packed [6:58] and stacked in order to overthrow Roe versus Wade and get the Dobbs decision. [7:04] We know that the court may be in a different posture on some of these things. [7:08] But we ask all of the justices to live their oaths of office to uphold the Constitution and the rule of law. [7:17] I ask them, I ask everybody in Congress, I ask everybody in the country to go back and read the steel seizure case [7:25] from 1952 where President Truman ordered the seizure of the steel mills in the middle of a war, [7:32] in the middle of the Korean War, he said it was a national security crisis and we couldn't afford to have a strike [7:39] and a standoff between the unions and the management. [7:42] And so he just ordered that all of the steel mills be seized. [7:47] And the Supreme Court came back with a remarkable decision saying the president gets his power [7:54] only from either the explicit text of the Constitution or from Congress. [8:01] And Congress had already rejected the idea that the president should have the power to seize the steel mills. [8:08] And so the court said in a six to three decision, the Constitution doesn't grant you that power. [8:14] And Congress forbade you that power. [8:16] And Justice Jackson, in his famous concurrence, said at that point, your power, Mr. President, is at its lowest ebb. [8:24] But here's the remarkable thing about the decision, which is indeed the paradigm for interpreting executive power, [8:31] as Justice Amy Coney Barrett said in her confirmation hearings over here in the Senate. [8:40] The remarkable thing about the decision is that there were nine Democrats, most of them New Deal liberal Democrats, [8:48] on the Supreme Court at that moment. [8:51] President Roosevelt had been in for four terms. [8:54] Truman had come in. [8:55] These people, they were friends. [8:57] A lot of the justices had served in the Roosevelt administration or in the Truman administration. [9:06] Some had been in the Department of Justice. [9:08] And in fact, the three justices in dissent taunted them, saying, you said this was totally fine. [9:15] You wanted this to be a power that the president would have. [9:18] And now you're on the court and you're saying the president does have this power. [9:21] But it was really their finest moment because they distinguished their roles as partisans when they were either in Congress or in the administration from their role as justices upholding the Constitution and the rule of law. [9:34] And they said, despite the fact that this was their team, they could not allow the president to overstep his bounds in that way. [9:46] And after the case was rendered, Justice Jackson was so nervous that President Truman would never speak to him again that he had a dinner party with all the justices. [9:56] And he invited President Truman to come over there. [10:00] And there was a round of toasts, and Truman said to Justice Jackson, well, I don't know if I like your law that much, but this is a hell of a good bourbon you're serving us tonight. [10:13] So we hope that the justices will live up to their titles. [10:19] They're the only jurists in the federal system who get the title of justice. [10:23] Everybody else is a judge, and we hope these justices will act with justice. [10:28] And I want to just say finally about the law firms, because I've been working with Senator Blumenthal and with Ms. Scanlon on the question of the law firms. [10:39] There is no safety in appeasement. [10:42] There just is no safety in appeasement. [10:44] These law firms have bargained away $40 million, tens of millions of dollars in pro bono assistance. [10:52] Well, now, if Donald Trump gets to choose who your clients are going to be, right, and you're going to end up representing, I don't know, the National Rifle Association, [11:03] the National Right to Life Committee, you name it, anti-environment, anti-LGBTQ, whatever it is. [11:10] Now, not only are you going to have to put the resources of your firm into these causes on behalf of a president who just shook your firm down, [11:20] but you're not going to be able to take any of the clients on the other side, because that's a conflict now. [11:28] You are conflicted out of representing the pro-environment, the pro-choice groups, the unions, if you've taken the people on the other side. [11:38] There is no safety in appeasing a tyrant. [11:41] There's no safety in selling out. [11:44] And these people are teaching us what the meaning of the rule of law really is. [11:49] Ben Franklin said, we must all hang together or we will all hang separately. [11:55] Let's hang together right now. [11:57] Let's stand tall, America, for our Constitution, our rule of law, and our democracy. [12:02] And I yield back to you, Senator Schiff. [12:05] I thank you, Reggie Member Raskin, and we are adjourned.