Ranking Member Raskin’s Opening Statement at Subcommittee Hearing on Republicans’ Retributive Attacks on Civil Society
Washington, D.C. (December 16, 2025)—Today, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, delivered opening remarks at the Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government hearing on Republicans’ attempt to silence civil society organizations.
Below are Ranking Member Raskin’s remarks at today’s hearing.
WATCH Ranking Member Raskin’s opening statement.
Ranking Member Jamie Raskin
Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government
Hearing on “Partisan and Profitable: The SPLC’s Influence on Federal Civil Rights Policy”
December 16, 2025
Thank you, Chairman Roy, and welcome to all of our witnesses here.
Lethal hate crimes are on the rise in America. We saw it at the Tree of Life Synagogue. We saw it in Buffalo, New York at the Tops Supermarket. We saw it in El Paso, Texas at the Walmart. We saw it in Charleston, South Carolina, at church. We see hate crimes every day across America. The president does not talk about extremist racial violence or white nationalism, which the Department of Homeland Security just a couple of years ago defined as America’s greatest domestic terror threat. The Trump Administration calls ANTIFA the most serious terrorist threat in the country, although no one can tell us where it’s headquartered, who its leaders are, what its structure is, how many members it has, or what crimes it is responsible for committing.
The FBI, in the last few months, abruptly cut ties with the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), deliberately closing its eyes to episodes of antisemitism that the ADL wants to bring to the attention of the country.
The Administration gutted the domestic terrorism operations section of the FBI, which monitored threats by violent groups, including white nationalists. President Trump, in fact, has a history of disturbing actions in this field. He invited over for a lavish dinner at Mar-A-Lago, Nicholas Fuentes, a vicious neo-Nazi and holocaust denier who calls for annihilation of the Jews and self-proclaimed Hitler lover.
Infamously, Donald Trump said he saw very fine people on both sides of an antisemitic riot in Charlottesville accompanying the Unite the Right Rally in 2018. He saw “very fine people” marching down the boulevard, which led into an antisemitic riot, a confusion that has not afflicted prior presidents like Franklin D. Roosevelt, who knew exactly which side America needs to be on when Nazis are on the march.
President Trump’s immigration enforcement teams are encouraged to violate people's civil rights, arresting people solely on the basis of the language they speak or the color of their skin. The president calls refugees garbage. He calls the Somali American community garbage. He uses expletives to describe entire countries in Africa. He pardoned 1,600 rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol and our Constitution on January 6, 2021, including hundreds who pled guilty to or were convicted of violently attacking our police officers with baseball bats, steel pipes, broken furniture, and bear mace.
Many of those pardoned convicts proudly carried Confederate battle flags and Nazi paraphernalia into the Capitol, and many of them, since their pardons, have gone on to commit other crimes against American citizens like terroristic threats, home invasion, armed robbery, rape, child sex, sex abuse, material trafficking, and so on.
Now in other times, Democrats and Republicans alike would rely on the Southern Poverty Law Center to help us keep track of the movements of violent white supremacy in the country. The Southern Poverty Law Center has been a vigilant voice in civil society against radical white nationalist violence and extremism, neo-Nazism and other forces across the political spectrum that spread organized hate from any quarter.
The president, however, wants to undermine civil society organizations and to reduce our ability to defend ourselves against the virus of racial violence. The Administration is engaged in a full-blown assault on civil society, the nonprofits, the law firms, the universities, the independent journalists who gather information, research the white supremacist movement, and defend our freedom and our civil rights and voting rights in court.
The Majority, unfortunately, now has chosen to hold a hearing to promote its conspiracy theories about the Southern Poverty Law Center simply for exercising its First Amendment rights. If my friend the Chair is shocked and horrified that a private group would call out hate speech and violence where it arises, how does the Chairman feel about actual government officials accusing other government officials of various crimes? On November 20th, President Trump accused six members of the House and Senate of “seditious behavior from traitors” and wants to “Lock them up” when all they did was to state the uncontroversial truth that members of the armed forces have a duty to refuse illegal orders. How does he feel about high-ranking presidential aide Stephen Miller saying, “the Democrats are not a political party. It is a domestic extremist organization.” Certainly, I think it's more dangerous when you have government officials engaging in speech like that.
The Southern Poverty Law Center promotes nonviolence in America, an interracial coalition, and peace. To my knowledge, not a single member of the Southern Poverty Law Center, in its more than five decades of existence, has ever been convicted of participating in a violent crime. But it is the target of this hit job today, part of this broader attack on the not-for-profit community.
Long before the horrifying assassination of Charlie Kirk, which I have vehemently denounced, the president and his allies have targeted law firms that represent clients he doesn’t like, universities that don’t follow a line of right-wing dogma and political correctness, and journalists who dare to report facts critical of the Trump Administration’s corruption and authoritarianism. They now simply are using Mr. Kirk’s murder to engage in tactics, imputing collective guilt, guilt by association, and guilt by pure invention against civil society groups that they don’t like.
Last September, President Trump issued an executive order purporting to designate ANTIFA as a domestic terror organization, even though a senior FBI official struggled just last week in testimony in Congress to explain how ANTIFA is even an organization, after claiming without irony that it is the largest domestic threat facing the United States.
More than 3,000 nonprofit groups have signed an open letter asserting that the National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM-7) on Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence is not about protecting Americans or defending the public interest. It's about using unchecked power to silence opposition and voices that the president disagrees with. To put it bluntly, the Trump Justice Department seeks to redefine any kind of political dissent against him as domestic terrorism. That is a classic Orwellian and authoritarian tactic that anybody who loves freedom should reject. We must hold a hearing on the Trump Administration’s attempt to criminalize political dissent in the country. Instead, we get this hearing rehashing the same old lies about the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Mr. Chairman, we can do a lot better than this. We should all be working together to oppose real political violence and terror, which remain a plague on the land. We must denounce political violence across the spectrum, and we should allow any civil society group to call out extremism, terrorism, fanaticism and violence as they see it.
But today, we miss the mark a lot by targeting one group only, which has always proclaimed its fidelity to the Constitution, to civil peace, and to nonviolence in the country.
I yield back to you, Mr. Chairman.