Ranking Member Raskin’s Opening Statement at Subcommittee Hearing on Republicans’ Refusal to Address the Trump Affordability Crisis
Washington, D.C. (March 17, 2026)—Today, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, delivered opening remarks at the Subcommittee on the Administrative State, Regulatory Reform, and Antitrust hearing examining Republicans’ futile effort to downplay the affordability crisis driving up prices for American consumers. Below are Ranking Member Raskin’s remarks, as prepared for delivery, at today’s hearing.
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WATCH Ranking Member Raskin’s opening statement. Ranking Member Jamie Raskin Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thanks to the witnesses. A majority of Americans feel like they’re getting priced out of Donald Trump’s new gilded age in America. A third of Americans, around 82 million people, are skipping meals or cutting back on critical utilities to afford basic health care. Prices for food staples like eggs, sugar, and meat increased substantially in 2025 and are climbing every day. Whether you rent or own, housing is becoming more unaffordable and out-of-reach for the working middle class while Donald Trump bulldozes the White House and throws Great Gatsby parties at Mar-a-Lago for his deranged billionaire Cabinet and his fellow stars in the Epstein Files. Forget owning a house when three-quarters of Americans say buying a new car is even out of the question. And if they have a car, driving it is becoming ludicrously expensive as gas prices have shot up 25% with Trump’s unilateral war of choice in the Middle East and gas prices are surging every day as the theocrats of Iran retaliate by shutting down the shipment of oil through the Strait of Hormuz and Donald Trump spends $2 billion a day on a war we never declared and didn't even debate, putting it on America’s imaginary credit card and driving up our deficit and debt. President Trump’s impulsively stupid policies and the invertebrate response of Republicans in Congress have made life even more expensive and difficult for our people. Republicans decided not to address an imminent healthcare crisis and instead chose to cut the tax credits that help make healthcare affordable and accessible to all American families. Meantime, monopolies and corporate giants rule in Trump’s economy. MAGA-controlled agencies have waived through giant mergers in the real estate market, which means that you pay more for a home and have fewer options for buying one. They also settled slam dunk rent price fixing cases where corrupt landlords across the country conspired to set the rent you pay for your home, ensuring that landlords get richer while your apartment gets less affordable. Just last week the DOJ okayed an obviously corrupt settlement of the Live Nation Ticketmaster suit, which may appease MAGA’s big business funders but will do nothing to lower the exorbitant prices we pay to see live entertainment in venues controlled by this monopoly. The government originally accused Live Nation Ticketmaster of controlling a multibillion-dollar live event business that stifles competition, coerces artists and venues into using its services, and drives up the ticket prices for millions of fans while pocketing bloated profits. But under the Trump Administration, the years-long case is settled with no changes for the millions of American consumers, artists, venues, and competitors this business injured and overcharged. President Trump promised that it would be foreign countries, not Americans, who’d pay for his giant unilaterally imposed tariffs. He promised they’d create jobs. Both promises turned out to be empty. The tariffs that President Trump applied unilaterally, haphazardly, and unevenly—and, it turns out, if course, unconstitutionally—failed to create jobs and instead taxed each American more than $2,500 last year. A study by the Federal Reserve shows that 90 percent of these tariff costs were paid by American companies and American consumers, not China or any other foreign country. To make matters worse, this brutal affordability squeeze lands most heavily on people who lost critical social services, like SNAP food stamp benefits, children’s health insurance, Medicaid and Medicare, and funding for rural hospitals when House Republicans passed their One Big Ugly Monstrous class-warfare Bill. Our government has the agency tools needed to address this Marie Antoinette affordability crisis, but President Trump has either totally dismantled them or thoroughly corrupted them. He has broken the agencies that protect Americans against scams, frauds, and conspiracies to make us pay too much for everyday products and services. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was the first and only federal agency dedicated to protecting us from being scammed by financial corporations. The CFPB got 220 million Americans $21 billion back that they were cheated out of by white-collar fraudsters and scam kings. Trump has waged war on the CFPB and anyone in the government who has championed consumers’ rights against professional ripoff artists. He has fired any antitrust official who has disagreed with his policy of giving political allies a thumbs-up to buy up their competitors. Last month he abruptly dismissed Assistant Attorney General Gail Slater, who was often the lone dissenting voice as lobbyists in backrooms and White House insiders pushed mergers that are egregiously bad for consumers and driving us towards an economy run by oligarchs and swindlers. The Majority has conducted zero oversight of these antitrust corruption debacles, leaving it to the Democrats to invite Gail Slater’s deputy, Roger Alford, who was fired for raising concerns about pay-to-play rank corruption and self-dealing in the Republican controlled antitrust agencies, to testify before our committee. He implored us, to our faces, to conduct oversight of the Antitrust Division before it’s too late. A two-term Trump official asked us to do our jobs to protect the American people. But it has fallen on deaf ears among our colleagues. President Trump’s terrible policies and Republican inaction to curtail his unconstitutional and unlawful actions mean that today Americans cannot afford daily life, but Trump and the billionaire class are getting richer every day. Just four tech billionaires—Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Jensen Huang, all of whom donated to Trump’s inauguration—made $288 billion in less than one year. By contrast, Americans paid $2,500 on average last year for higher prices thanks to just tariffs. The President has said that the affordability crisis is a “hoax,” a “con job” and a “scam.” But his illegal tariffs were the hoax, his claim to support release of the Epstein files is the con job and his illegal unilateral war in Iran, which is costing us $1 billion a day and 13 American lives and more than 1,000 Iranian lives, including children, already, is the scam. The real fraud is President Trump’s personal net worth going up $1.4 billion in his first year of his second term and his son-in-law Jared Kushner raking in $2 billion from the Saudis and more than $1.5 billion from Qatar while exercising a lot more influence over the decision to war against war than all the Members in this room combined. And what are we here today to discuss? An esoteric antitrust exemption in shipping. Now, in normal times, I might appreciate an examination of this or any other antitrust exemption. But these are not normal times. And this Majority isn’t even prepared to reform the exemption in any event, something I would be open to discussing. But millions of Americans literally cannot afford to eat, get medicine, or pay for housing in Trump’s economy. We must do everything we can to help them, now, with the tools we actually have at our disposal. Instead, our Republican colleagues have called us here to discuss a niche antitrust exemption that is unlikely to change anytime soon. The ship of state is taking on water rapidly and starting to sink but our colleagues want to have a debate about peripheral and diversionary things. Count me out. Thank you, Mr. Chair. I yield back. |