Ranking Member Raskin’s Opening Statement at Subcommittee Hearing on Republicans’ Attacks on Judicial Independence
Washington, D.C. (June 24, 2025)—Today, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, delivered opening remarks at the Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence, and the Internet hearing on President Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans’ crusade to undermine the independence of the judicial branch to prevent courts from holding Trump accountable for his unlawful actions.
Below are Ranking Member Raskin’s remarks, as prepared for delivery, at today’s hearing.
WATCH Ranking Member Raskin’s opening statement.
Ranking Member Jamie Raskin
Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence, and the Internet
Hearing on “Fiscal Accountability and Oversight of the Federal Courts”
June 24, 2025
Thank you, Chairman Issa, and thank you to the witnesses for being with us here today.
The hearing is on “fiscal responsibility” in the U.S. courts, which makes matters pretty simple for me. We should make sure we give our federal courts all the resources they need to carry out their constitutional duties without fearing for the safety of judges or their families, court personnel, and members of the public who attend federal courthouses.
We should thus set a legislative record about the needs of the judicial branch. We obviously should not attempt to see if Congress can use its power of the purse to coerce judges into ruling in a certain way. That’s an attack on judicial independence, its unfettered power to say what the law is.
Funding is essential to a healthy and independent judicial body. Alexander Hamilton began Federalist 79 by acknowledging this relationship. “Next to permanency in office, nothing can contribute more to the independence of the judges than a fixed provision for their support,” he wrote. “In the general course of human nature, a power over a man’s subsistence amounts to a power over his will.”
Alas, power over the judiciary’s will is exactly what Donald Trump has sought since he took office six months ago. Judges who decide in his favor are brilliant faithful judges, and those who decide against him are “communist radical-left judges” even if they were appointed to the bench by a Republican president. In March, he called for the impeachment of a federal judge who ruled against his administration, a judge who had been nominated to the bench first by President George W. Bush.
“This judge, like many of the Crooked Judges’ I am forced to appear before, should be IMPEACHED,” Trump posted on social media. Meanwhile, Trump’s MAGA allies in Congress have repeatedly fought to change the way the courts work just to benefit both him personally and his administration, such as when they tried to make all state cases against him and his cronies removable to federal court and to prevent judges from being able to issue injunctions that apply beyond the parties to a case. And last month, this very committee passed a provision stripping the power of judicial contempt in certain cases that would allow Donald Trump to ignore some adverse federal court decisions, even though eight in ten Americans think the President should have to obey the courts and that is indeed the whole premise of judicial review since Marbury v. Madison was decided in 1803.
But the MAGA siege on the judicial branch hasn’t just been limited to anti-judiciary legislation. Every major resource the courts need to act as an independent branch of the government is less achievable because of Donald Trump and his MAGA followers in Congress. Trump’s hyper-personalized ad hominem rhetoric against individual judges has helped fuel an increase in threats to judicial security. Trump’s lieutenants at DOGE have sharply limited the buildings available to the judiciary even as our courthouses are crumbling. American cybersecurity, including our court IT systems, is weaker under Trump, after he neutered the subagency within the Department of Homeland Security responsible for keeping the country secure from online attack. And MAGA Republican leadership took a bipartisan deal to get the judiciary more federal judges and then twisted it to their own ends.
Some of my Republican colleagues have suggested that the only way the judiciary will get the funding it needs is if judges change how they rule on decisions important to the White House. Punchbowl News recently reported about the controversy over threats to judges. For example, when asked about increased funding for judicial security in light of the skyrocketing threats to federal judges, my friend Chairman Jordan told a reporter, “I don’t know that there’s going to be a lot of people excited about giving them an increase.” Another one of my colleagues across the aisle reportedly suggested that the judiciary “should stop screwing everything up” if they want more security funding.
Checks and balances only work under the U.S. Constitution when the three branches of our government respect each other’s essential independence of action and decision. To withhold the means of guaranteeing the physical safety of a judge or their family is to compromise and undermine their independence. A judge who receives deliveries at her home reminding her that the people threatening her online know where she and her children live may be less able to rule objectively on the merits of a case if they feel they are endangering their family’s safety.
This is not an academic point but an urgently practical one. Threats to federal judges skyrocketed over the past six months as Donald Trump escalated his personal threats and rhetoric against the courts and federal judges. According to the U.S. Marshals Service, 197 judges were threatened from early March to late May this year, more than double the number of judges threatened in the previous five months.
Judicial security should not and has never been a partisan issue. When Justice Kavanaugh was targeted in 2022, Chairman Jordan rightly said that, “We don’t want any violence anywhere. But let’s not have this double standard.” And I agree! We must oppose all violence and all threats of violence against the federal judiciary from whatever quarter. And we most keep our public servants safe by giving the judicial branch all the security funding it needs, wholly without regard to which judges are being protected and what cases they are handling.
Political control over judges is a hallmark of monarchical and authoritarian regimes. Indeed, King George’s attacks on judicial independence were part of the bill of particulars set forth in complaint against him by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. “He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.”
It would be a dangerous breach of our constitutional values to withhold critical security funding for the federal judiciary in an effort to change the way judges decide their cases. I am certain that we cannot and will not do that today.
I look forward to hearing more from our witnesses and I yield back the remainder of my time.