Ranking Member Raskin’s Remarks Before the Judicial Conference
Washington, D.C. (March 10, 2026)—Today, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, spoke at the Judicial Conference’s meeting. Below are Ranking Member Raskin’s remarks, as prepared for delivery.
Ranking Member Jamie Raskin
Prepared Remarks for the Judicial Conference
March 10, 2026
Good morning. Thank you, Mr. Chief Justice. This colloquy between our two branches has become a favorite part of my job as ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee because it expresses our commitment to be involved in the common enterprise of advancing justice and the rule of law in America.
So thanks for having us back. My counterpart Chairman Jordan could not be with us today and I’d like to think he’d yield me his time, but alas I cannot represent that.
Forgive me, Chief Justice Roberts, for starting on an academic note, but, as you know, I was a law professor for 25 years before coming to Congress. I promise to quickly reach the pressing issues at hand.
In the work of both my branch of government and yours, we offer reasons for our decisions. In Congress we generally offer policy reasons that have a utilitarian character: what will provide the greatest good for the greatest number of people? Sometimes it is reason enough for us to act based on specific constitutional duties as when we certify electoral college votes under the Twelfth Amendment.
In the judicial domain, you do your constitutional duty in specific cases and controversies by offering reasons for your decisions based on the logic and compulsion of legal analysis following from specific constitutional and statutory text as well as case precedents.
The opposite of decision-making based on reason is decision-making based on violent force and coercion. This is why the current wave of violence and threats of violence against legislators and judges is so dangerous.
It’s not just that we and our family members can all get hurt or killed by the kind of mob violence which overran the Capitol on January 6, 2021, or the kinds of attacks suffered by Daniel Anderl, the 20-year-old son of Judge Salas who was murdered at the judge’s home in North Brunswick, New Jersey. It’s that violence and violent threats are designed to overturn the rule of law itself, replacing the democratic social contract of non-violent reason-giving with a lawless state of nature, violence and vendetta. This threat to the rule of law is just as serious as Executive branch actors disregarding judicial orders.
Last year alone, in 2025, 400 federal judges were targets of serious threats, a 78 percent jump in just four years.
There has been a similar uptick in bomb threats, swatting incidents, assassination attempts, pizza deliveries—the kind that even pizza-lovers don’t want—and threatening and hate-filled emails and voicemails.
Some federal judges, and their families, are being instructed by the US Marshals not to accept packages at their homes or even answer their own doors.
Congress must act to ensure that every judge is safe. And I will continue to do everything in my power, as Ranking Member or Chairman, to make sure you have all the resources and authorities you need to make that real.
Those threatening judges, with menacing voicemails, physical violence, doxxing, or by calling for them to be impeached for ruling a particular way, all share an illegitimate ambition: they seek to change the outcome of cases through fear and coercion.
But the rising tide of threats against federal judges reflects a basic and spreading misunderstanding of what judges and Justices do. You are not legislators who are expressing your policy preferences or the policy preferences of your constituents. Nor are you Executive branch officials who are implementing a public policy decision. You are judges elucidating the meaning of constitutional or statutory law as the “least dangerous branch.” Because you are bound by law to expound the law, it is not only a crime but a logical fallacy to target you with violence the way presidents and representatives have historically been targeted (not that political violence is ever legitimate in any context) because any other judge would presumably be doing the exact same thing.
We must combat the misconception that judges are political actors as opposed to elucidators of the meaning of the law. This means the Judiciary itself must make sure that the rule of law operates in a way which makes it clear to everyone what law is.
On this point I know of no better judicial decision than Chief Judge Richard Arnold of the 8th Circuit’s brilliant 2000 opinion in Anastasoff v. United States.
There, Judge Arnold struck down Rule 28A(i) of the 8th Circuit’s own rules which generally prevented the citation of unpublished judicial opinions, even those rendered in the 8th Circuit itself. Judge Arnold established that following precedent is the heart of the judicial enterprise and there is no such thing as a federal court decision that has no precedential value or meaning. All case decisions are precedents. The invalidated rule against citing unpublished opinions, he found, “expands the judicial power beyond the limits set by Article III by allowing us complete discretion to determine which judicial decisions will bind us and which will not. Insofar as it limits the precedential effect of our prior decisions, the Rule is unconstitutional.” Judges not bound by all relevant precedent are operating much more like legislators or executives.
But what the courts need to realize, and here I speak as a true and devoted friend, is how much the shadow docket—which is filled with consequential decisions issued without rationale—contributes to the public perception of judges as policy-makers rather than expositors of the law. It creates conditions where the Court can blow hot and cold on critical issues without being accountable in our constitutional system for the change. To what extent is the Court consistently applying doctrines like “major questions” or “non-delegation,” such that the American people can trust that the same rules applied to strike down President Biden’s executive policies are being neutrally applied to the next Administration?
Consistency requires Courts to give statements of reasons, in a way that shows judicial humility to be bound by the rule in the next case, even though the rule may then cut against a different political faction next time. That is, reaching an outcome by means of an explicit categorical rule is the only way that the losers in one case can get traction in the next, by insisting that the rule be applied even-handedly. The worst part of Bush v. Gore, a decision rendered just a few months after Chief Judge Arnold’s opinion, was not its outcome, nor even its tortured reasoning, but the declaration that the Court would not be bound by it in any future case. That statement not only betrays a complete lack of confidence in the decision’s own reasoning but a lack of understanding of what the rule of law means.
As Judge Arnold observed in Anastasoff about courts’ ruling that unpublished decisions are not precedents: “Those courts are saying to the bar: ‘We may have decided this question the opposite way yesterday, but this does not bind us today, and, what’s more, you cannot even tell us what we did yesterday.’ As we have tried to explain in this opinion, such a statement exceeds the judicial power, which is based on reason, not fiat.” It’s literally outside the power of the courts in Article III to render decisions not based on fully explicit reasoning.
The shadow docket betrays the Supreme Court’s lofty statement in Loper Bright that it is courts, not the variable whims of Executive agencies, that must have the final interpretive word on the meaning of federal laws, because, as the Chief Justice put it, in the foundational decision of Marbury v. Madison, Chief Justice Marshall famously declared that “it is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is.”
Yes, but that means that the Court must indeed say what the law is, not merely indicate a conclusory result.
Executives and their agencies are free to float and fluctuate to the opposite pole in policy debates of the previous administrations, but courts declare why they interpret the law in a definitive way and that is why their word is final on existing statutory language and why they rightfully enjoy supremacy under Loper Bright.
The shadow docket’s flight from reason is an affront to the historic role of the judiciary because its fleeting, conclusory statements are typically the final word on the case. Preliminary injunctions, stays and their grant or denial effectively resolve the matter, since by the time a final judgment issues in the lower courts, the controversy will have been resolved in practice by the unexplained and inscrutable shadow docket decision.
We must do everything in our power to renew confidence in the rule of law and respect for judges and courts in our country today. This means we must restore the law as a reason-giving discipline where logic, analogy and interpretive method govern, not the deployment of raw power, coercion and, least of all, violence.
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