FINALLY: Jamie Raskin TAKES ACTION against Trump DC takeover

FINALLY: Jamie Raskin TAKES ACTION against Trump DC takeover

I’m joined now by Congressman Jamie Raskin. Congressman, thanks for joining me. It’s like to be with you, Brian. So, you’ve stepped into the fray along with some other colleagues on the House Oversight Committee, Jasmine Crockett, Greg Cassar, Robert Garcia, um to push back against what these Texas Republicans are doing by virtue of trying to get the FBI involved in retrieving these Democrats who fled to uh uh Illinois and California to break Cororum. Uh, can you give a little bit of insight into what you’re looking to to find out from Cash Patel and Pam Bondi here? Well, this is not the first time that Republicans have actually tried to get the FBI and other federal agents involved in umounding and harassing Democrats from the Texas state legislature who are trying to break quorum in order to prevent a complete demolition of people’s voting rights. And here, of course, um, in the wake of their throwing 17 million people off of Medicaid, Donald Trump’s solution was to say, “We’re going to basically squeeze five more US House seats out of Texas.” And the way they’re going to do that is to have a mid decade redistricting. So with the mid decade redistricting um they could you know destroy a whole bunch of house seats of our colleagues like uh Julie Johnson and Lloyd Dog, Greg Casar, Al Green, Henry Quayar. Um and so they’re targeting Democrats and so the the state legislative Democrats have said no way we’re not going to participate in that. were not showing up for an extraordinary mid decade demolition of people’s voting rights and they left the state. So now they’re saying uh the Republicans are saying well we’re going to declare their seats vacant and in the meantime we’re going to get the FBI to hunt them down. One problem with that is that they’re not violating or even accused of violating any federal statute. There’s no federal law against leaving your state. On the contrary, the Constitution gives you the right to leave your state. So there’s no federal offense they’re being accused of. And President Trump wants to use the FBI like his own personal national security private police force to do whatever he wants for political reasons. So is there any steps that that Congress would be able to take to prevent the abuse of the FBI? You know, look, Trump is going to Trump doesn’t care and he’s going to be able he’s going to want to send them in because he views them again as his personal police force. And so, is there anything that you can do to prevent that abuse from happening before he actually does it? So, with, you know, uh, Congressman Garcia, who’s now the ranking member of the oversight committee, which, um, was my old position. I’m now on the judiciary committee. Um, we together have said um that this is totally out of bounds and off limits to the FBI and we demanded from Pam Bondi and from Cash Patel a complete accounting of what’s going on there because you’ve got Republican senators who are simply stating as a fact that the FBI is involved in this. We don’t know whether they’re not telling the truth or whether they’re telling the truth, but they’re not coming clean on it. But in any event, we want to know and we want to use our oversight power over the Department of Justice to find out what’s happening. You know, can you speak about the the the fact that they are trying to present this and you and you alluded to this before. They are trying to present this as some crime being committed by the Texas Democrats, but in fact, quum breaking is is a tool that’s been upheld by the Texas Supreme Court. And it’s a tool that’s been used throughout American history as early as the 1800s. I mean, Abraham Lincoln jumped out of a window in the Illinois State House to break quorum because he didn’t agree with something that they were trying to pass. And so, this is this is in our in our over 200 year history, this has been used several times as a political tool to achieve a political end. Well, it’s obviously uh a legitimate parliamentary procedure. It’s also plainly not a federal offense. there’s no federal crime of crossing state lines uh for the purposes of evading a quorum or denying a quorum. On the contrary, as you say, it’s a timeh hallowed political maneuver. In any event, it you know, if if it were to be a federal crime, Congress would have to adopt it. It would have to be signed into law by the president and there is no federal offense. Therefore, the FBI should get back to work on uh child sex trafficking, for example, or anti-terrorism efforts. It should not be working on chasing down Democrats just because the president wants them to. So, I want to switch gears here now to Trump’s ending home rule in Washington DC. Um, can you talk a little bit about the procedure of what he’s able to do? There’s a 48 hour rule that he’s in the midst of right now and that that could be extended only if Congress votes to extend it. So what are the rules here in terms of Congress being uh able to extend uh Trump’s Trump’s suspension of home rule in in DC? Well, in 1973, Congress gave modified home rule to the District of Columbia, meaning there’s a mayor, there’s a city council, there’s a school board, there’s self-government there. Um, Congress always has residual authority to step in the way a state would uh have the authority to step in for a particular city or a county under it. But basically that there’s a home rule government. There’s a provision in that home rule charter which says that uh in the event of a federal emergency, the president can take over the DC police force. And so without specifying what the emergency is, Donald Trump has declared that there is an emergency and has said he’s taking over the DC police force. The mayor didn’t ask for it. The DC council didn’t ask for it. Crime is at a 30-year low in the District of Columbia. Congress did not ask for it. Um it looks like a transparent um distraction from the president’s problems with respect to the Epstein file which as you know Brian he promised to release but now suddenly he’s gone very quiet on it and just is trying to hide the Epstein file under his bed somewhere. So this is another effort to change the subject and to attack a Democrat city. uh he’s talking about graffiti and too many homeless people and so on. And if anybody, you know, wanted uh Donald Trump to be the mayor of their city, they would have elected him mayor of the city. But he’s invoking this provision after 48 hours. Congress has the power to declare that there’s not an emergency. And I uh am going to be introducing a joint resolution, a motion to declare that there is no emergency in DC. Uh hopefully we get some Republicans to join us. If not, it will last only for the 1-month period. Uh, at which point it expires unless Congress decides to reauthorize emergency powers in the District of Columbia. But, you know, I’ve been thinking ever since this started, Brian, we know what an emergency looks like in DC because we had one 4 and a half years ago on January 6, 2021 when Trump unleashed terrible mob violence against the police force of the District of Columbia, the Capitol Police, the Congress, the Vice President of the United States, and um refused to do what he’s doing right now, which is to activate the National Guard. So he’s he’s not uh he did not activate the National Guard when we needed it and now he’s activating the National Guard when nobody’s asking for it. If Congress wants to authorize this thing, does it take a simple majority or will it take 60 senators like when you’re passing any actual law? It would take to it would take an actual majority just to pass uh a statutory emergency for DC and to invoke emergency powers. But with the procedures of the Senate, um it would effectively take 60 senators in order to determine that. So in theory, they’re they’re likely not going to get 60 senators unless there’s a bunch of defections by Democrats. And so does that suggest that we won’t even see a first 30-day extension? Well, I guess the ambiguous question is whether he can just keep um declaring 30-day emergencies. Uh we would say, of course, no. That defeats the whole idea of it just being for 30 days and then turning it over to Congress to decide. Um, but as with everything else, you know, Donald Trump’s attention span is like 3 minutes and so he’ll be off to Greenland or Panama or Canada or tariffs or something uh in that time. In any event, I mean, nobody believes that he’s really committed to public safety in DC. If he were, he would not have pardoned 1,600 insurrectionists and violent copers uh without talking to the police in DC or the mayor or the DC council. he would not have sacked dozens of the most experienced um criminal prosecutors at the US attorney’s office in DC uh simply because they had participated in the January 6 prosecutions and they would not have impounded essentially a billion dollars of locally raised revenue that the people of DC want to be able to spend on criminal justice and law enforcement and public education and so on. So nobody takes that seriously. this is just, you know, more theatrics and fireworks for him. Can you can you speak about the danger though of kind of normalizing Americans to this idea that the American mil military is going to be walking the streets of their cities in anticipation of what he may try to do as we head toward 2026? Because we’ve already seen from Trump himself, so this isn’t even just theoretical. We have seen Trump try to seize voting machines in an election. And of course there were folks like Bill Bar who were in place, not exactly some raging Democrat, but Bill Bar in place saying that his claims of a stolen election were Bill Bar is now replaced with Pam Bondi who’s perfectly content to tow the line uh whatever Donald Trump puts forward. And so, you know, this idea that that now there’s no opposition to him from the DOJ and if he has boots on the ground in the form of these these troops, these National Guardsmen, what can that mean as we head toward 2026? Well, you’re totally right that this is a destruction of a lot of traditional boundaries and constitutional boundaries. One is the boundary between uh the actual obligations and the duties of the military and regular police law enforcement. Um the posi commitatus act has banned in for most of American history the military being used for law enforcement purposes. And Donald Trump is talking about how the graffiti in the District of Columbia is out of control and the homeless people are out of control and that’s why he wants to put 800 National Guardsmen on the streets of Washington DC. Well, that’s obviously a destruction of a basic concept that we’ve had that you don’t use the military for purposes of law enforcement just like it’s not up to the president to be suspending habius corpus. that would be the role of Congress to do that. And yet Donald Trump is now trying to condition the country to get ready for uh what’s happening in DC to happen all over the country. He’s mentioned Baltimore. He’s mentioned Chicago and Detroit and Los Angeles. I think so. He has had different pretexts in different places. We know about the uh the immigration pretext for uh violating basic constitutional principles like due process. Now we have a law and order pretext in the District of Columbia despite the fact that crime is at a 30-year low. And uh one of the greatest spikes, if not the greatest spike in crime in this century has been when Donald Trump incited a violent insurrection against Congress in the District of Columbia. Um but in any event, he he wants the country to be conditioned to him simply declaring that Democratun cities are fair game for him to militarize law enforcement and take over the governance of the city. It’s an outrage and it’s totally outside the bounds of the Constitution. And finally, let’s finish off with this. Can you speak on the fact that it was Trump who just deployed the National Guard into Washington DC despite the last few years of him claiming that the only person who has the authority to deploy the National Guard into Washington DC or conversely to prevent the deployment of the National Guard into Washington DC was Nancy Pelosi or the speaker of the house. And so, you know, even if we grant him that, okay, Pelosi is not the speaker of the house. Was it Mike Johnson then who deployed the National Guard to Washington DC? And if not, how do you square the fact that he had said it could only be the speaker for the last several years while trying to defend himself? Right? And that was obviously fraudulent when he first started saying it, but now what we get is this at least indirect confession that he was lying all the time. Of course, the president controls the National Guard for DC. Uh the president is always in control of the National Guard for DC. And so by sitting on his hands uh during the riot he had unleashed uh he knew exactly what he was doing. And when he tweeted out uh you know that Vice President Pence did not have the courage to do what needed to be done. He knew that he was further emboldening uh the mob and not doing anything to stop the mob and to protect his vice president or protect the Congress. And that’s why Mike Pence didn’t run with him again. It permanently burned bridges there. But uh this indeed is uh a very frank acknowledgement that yeah, he’s got power over the National Guard when it comes to Washington DC. We’ll leave it there. Congressman, thank you so much for the time. Great bringing with you, Brian. Thanks so much for having me.

INTERVIEW: Jamie Raskin condemns Trump’s DC takeover

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