During a House Judiciary Committee markup hearing, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) tore into the Trump Administration, and condemned the legislation before the committee.
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00:00Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman.
00:05You know, it must be tough to be an authoritarian.
00:08You promise everybody in the world to get elected.
00:11Prices will go down on day one.
00:13No more inflation.
00:15We're going to end Russia's war on Ukraine.
00:18The world's going to respect us.
00:19And then you get in, and even though you inherit an economy from your predecessor that's described as the envy of the world by The Economist magazine, you crash everything.
00:30The economy today is shrinking.
00:32The stock market is sinking.
00:34Inflation is soaring.
00:36Seven trillion dollars in American retirements and wealth has been destroyed.
00:43You've plunged us with your imbecilic tariffs into a trade war with the whole world, except, of course, for your bosom buddies in Russia.
00:51So now only 100 days in, with 100 unforced policy blunders, you're the most unpopular president at this point in your presidency in more than 80 years.
01:03Barack Obama stood at 69% in the polls.
01:06Ronald Reagan was at 73% in the polls.
01:08Truman was 87%.
01:10And Franklin D. Roosevelt, 68%.
01:13But Donald Trump is at 39%.
01:16The lowest 100-day approval rating since polling began.
01:22He controlled the agenda for 100 days.
01:24He controlled the House.
01:25He controlled the Senate.
01:26He's got everything going for him.
01:27And his numbers are in the gutter.
01:30So now he reaches back into the authoritarian playbook.
01:33Go back and please the wealthiest people and corporations in the country.
01:39House Republicans want to cut hundreds of billions of dollars from Medicaid, food assistance for mothers and children, veterans benefits, Meals on Wheels, Head Start, any programs that help actual people, all in order to pay for another gargantuan tax break for the president's billionaire benefactors.
01:57And here in the Judiciary Committee, our good friends want to help Donald Trump use his power in violation of the Constitution that we are all sworn to uphold and defend against enemies foreign and domestic.
02:11Every day, the administration uses immigration enforcement as a template to erode constitutional rights and liberties.
02:17They round up people in the street and disappear them to the torture prison of a foreign dictator without one minute of due process, sweeping up completely innocent people who have no criminal record and no criminal charges in the midst of other people who may have criminal records and criminal charges and should stand prosecution for them if they do have charges against them.
02:42They're stripping college and graduate students at American universities of their visas for writing op-eds that the administration disagrees with.
02:51They invoke emergency wartime powers like the Alien Enemies Act to fight a military invasion at the border while telling us that the border has never been safer than it is right now.
03:03My colleagues say all these measures are necessary to deport gang members, violent criminals, the worst of the worst.
03:10But they're not targeting the worst of the worst.
03:12They're arresting judges now.
03:14They're using federal agents to round up law-abiding members of the community with no criminal records.
03:21Parents of American children, husbands and wives of American spouses, people who have not been shown to pose any public safety threat at all.
03:30They're breaking into cars to arrest mothers as their children's watch in terror.
03:34They're arresting people who are coming in for their citizenship interviews.
03:39They're staking out people's homes and trolling through IRS taxpayer data in search of taxpaying people to deport.
03:48Look, we know how to remove people from the country who should not be here.
03:53President Biden's administration did that.
03:55We know how to do it legally, consistent with the Bill of Rights and the Constitution.
04:00But the Trump administration has discarded the rule of law.
04:04If he can sweep non-citizens off the street and fly them to a torturer's prison in El Salvador with no due process, he can do it to citizens too.
04:14Because if there's no due process, if there's no fair hearing, you've got no opportunity to object.
04:19And indeed, several American citizen children, including one with cancer, were flown to Honduras last week with no due process, as a Trump-appointed judge in Louisiana found.
04:33Now the courts have issued more than 95 preliminary injunctions and temporary restraining orders against this reign of lawlessness.
04:41But Republicans want to enable President Trump to keep going.
04:46This Judiciary Committee bill seeks to strip the courts of their power to hold an administration in contempt when the president violates explicit judicial court orders.
04:58And it doesn't stop there.
04:59While they tried to defund the courts, they're forking over an astonishing $81 billion to the administration for more of these immigration roundups.
05:09The legislation includes a whopping $45 billion for ICE on top of its annual budget of $9 billion for family and adult detention centers alone.
05:20This bill is a blank check to the administration to do more of what we've already seen.
05:25And to make matters worse, as they race to spend more than $81 additional billion on this, Trump's own DOJ is terminating hundreds of millions of dollars in existing grants.
05:39They're cutting funding for county, state, and local law enforcement.
05:43They're cutting funding for opioid addiction treatment programs.
05:46They're cutting funding for crime prevention.
05:49And they're cutting funding for victims of rape, sexual assault, and violent crimes.
05:54The grants being cut support local police in solving and preventing crime.
06:00They help the survivors of abuse and assault navigate the legal system.
06:04And yet they're being wiped out by the Department of Justice.
06:08They're also trying to handcuff the agencies that work to make sure our food and drugs are safe and our air and water are clean.
06:15The RAINS Act is buried in here.
06:17It would prevent the government from enforcing our civil rights, protecting workplace safety, and guarding against misconduct by banks.
06:25It would require both houses of Congress and the president to approve every major rule from our agencies to take effect,
06:32virtually guaranteeing no effective regulatory action on any subject.
06:36They've also tucked the Midnight Rules Relief Act in here, which would allow Republicans to bundle hundreds of regulations all together into a single package and vote them down on a single jumbo resolution,
06:50which would be used to hide the most destructive deregulatory votes among dozens of others, completely burying it in darkness.
06:58Look, this version of an authoritarian America is not what the American people want.
07:05Please take note.
07:06This is why Donald Trump's polling numbers are in the gutter and in a historic low.
07:11This is not what the American people are looking for.
07:13We urge our colleagues to walk back from the brink here to support many amendments we plan to offer today that will save us money,
07:21that will actually address the real problems of the country, and that will protect the constitutional rights and freedoms that we cherish so much in America.
07:30This is a test.
07:31Are we going to stand up for the majority of the American people, for our Constitution and our Bill of Rights, and the freedoms we've fought for,
07:39or are we going to stand with a president who wants to throw it all away?
07:42Thank you, Mr. Chairman.
07:43Chairman, you're back.