Press Releases

Washington, D.C. (February 12, 2025)—Washington, D.C. (February 25, 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 the importance of maintaining an independent judiciary and increasing the number of federal judgeships fairly.

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 “Justice Delayed: The Crisis of Undermanned Federal Courts.”
February 25, 2025

We’re here today because of a broken promise. I don’t mean Donald Trump’s promise that he would lower the price of eggs even when eggs are now more expensive than they have ever been in U.S. history.  I don’t mean the promise that Trump would end Russia’s filthy war on Ukraine on Day One when now Trump has called Vladimir Zelensky a dictator and embarrassingly insisted that Ukraine started the war which Trump had actually praised Putin for starting, calling it an “act of genius.”

No, I mean a promise of the old-fashioned legislative variety, the kind Congress used to run on when our word was our bond.

Democrats and Republicans agree the courts need more federal judges. It’s been more than three decades since we passed a law to increase their numbers.

We had a bipartisan deal last Congress to give the federal courts the added judges they need. Ranking Member Hank Johnson and Chairman Darrell Issa worked on a painstaking and honorable bipartisan basis to create a bill that would have spread additional district court judgeship appointments recommended by the Judicial Conference over multiple presidential administrations, beginning with the next unknown president. That was the key—pass the bill before the election so no one would know whether this party or that party might benefit. 

The Senate upheld their end of the bargain and passed this bill on a bipartisan basis last August. Then the House Republican leadership suddenly broke the promise and refused to bring the bill up for a vote before the presidential election—before the next president was known.

Instead, they waited to know who would be president—if it was Harris, they would oppose it; if it were Trump, they would support it.

So now of course they support it.

Itching to appoint loyal MAGA judges to the bench to uphold the lawlessness of Elon Musk and Donald Trump, they are happy to talk about creating new seats on the federal bench. 

They broke their deal and have undermined justice and the courts.

We were willing to make a fair deal because we believe in “equal justice under law.”

They only believe in “heads I win, tails you lose.”

If my Republican colleagues want to do this the right way, the fair way, and the way they agreed to do it last year, let’s do it.  I have the precise bill you agreed to, drawn up for this Congress with me right here. It’s the deal Democrats and Republicans agreed on last year. The number of judicial appointments is the same. The order of appointments by state is the same. And just as before, these appointments would begin with the next President, whoever that may be of whichever party. You can join me and Ranking Member Johnson today in fixing our federal judiciary—without destroying it with party politics.

But if you can’t support the exact same agreement we all entered into, then we must call this hearing out for the naked and embarrassing power grab it is.

One week ago, President Trump signed an executive order declaring that he and the Attorney General “will interpret the law for the executive branch.” That comedic statement cuts directly against the decision in Marbury v. Madison where the Supreme Court said the judiciary could order Secretary of State Madison to deliver a signed judicial commission to William Marbury even if the President didn’t want him to. “It is emphatically the province and duty of the judicial department to say what the law is,” Chief Justice John Marshall wrote, debunking more than two centuries ago Donald Trump’s delusions of executive supremacy in interpreting the law.

Former Trump Chief of Staff John Kelly told the press that President Trump “prefers the dictator approach to government.” Candidate Donald Trump told Fox News Host Sean Hannity in December 2023 that he would be a “dictator on day one.” Just last week, the official White House X account posted a picture of Donald Trump wearing a crown and proclaiming, “long live the King.” I guess he forgot about Tom Paine, who Trump had the audacity to quote on Inauguration Day. Paine said that in the autocratic societies, “the King is the law.”  But in the free democratic societies, “the law is King.” We overthrew monarchy in our Revolution and our Constitution bans titles of nobility.

President Trump has been hard at work removing safeguards against lawlessness and corruption in the executive branch. He’s been gutting the career civil service and replacing it with an army of sycophants. He’s illegally sacked 18 inspectors general responsible for rooting out waste, fraud, and abuse. He’s been slashing into independent and bipartisan agencies charged with protecting the rights of workers, ensuring the integrity of elections, making sure consumer products are safe, and insuring bank deposits. He’s been ordering career prosecutors to carry out unlawful orders in criminal cases to test whether their ultimate loyalty is to the Constitution or to him; he’s been firing people who refuse to bend the knee, including staunch conservative Republicans. He’s been threatening FBI agents for doing their jobs and investigating members of violent extremist militias who beat cops as they mobbed the Capitol in their drive to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

He has attempted, with the stroke of a pen, to revoke birthright citizenship enshrined in the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution adopted by a two-thirds vote of the House and the Senate and ratified by three quarters of the states in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War.  He’s attempted to shutter agencies, like the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, created and appropriated by Congress to protect the American people against illegal junk fees, scams, fraud and other forms of abuse at the hands of big banks and predatory lenders. He’s attempted to freeze federal funding, which would gut cancer research, stop wildfire prevention, and cripple public education in every state across our union.

My Republican colleagues, who have a slight majority in both the House and the Senate, have done nothing to stand up for Congress’s powers under Article I of the Constitution. Instead, they have willingly surrendered them to the President.  Republican Senator Thom Tillis shrugged off Trump’s unconstitutional power grab and then laughed it off: “That runs afoul of the Constitution in the strictest sense,” Tillis said. But “it’s not uncommon for presidents to flex a little bit on where they can spend and where they can stop spending.”

Despite Congressional Republicans’ abdication of congressional authority there is still something that stands between Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and their dream of tyrannical authority: our independent judiciary. Which is why we are watching in real time as MAGA Republicans, putting their loyalty to Donald Trump and Elon Musk over their oath in which they swore to uphold our Constitution, turn on the federal court system.

The right-wing attacks on our independent judiciary didn’t come out of nowhere. For decades, the Federalist Society has sought to undermine judicial independence by ensuring that the judges and lawmakers and executive branch leaders all share the same political ideology, even if they serve different branches of government. Meanwhile, some of the same donors who fund right-wing candidates’ political campaigns are funding right-wing justices’ vacations, further shredding the Court’s credibility and independence.

But recent statements made by President Trump go much further. They threaten to abolish our system of checks and balances. Vice President Vance posted on social media, saying “judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power” and reposted a response calling on President Trump to defy the courts. Elon Musk has repeatedly undermined the judiciary on social media, saying things like “activist judges should be removed from the bench or there is no justice,” and “no judge is greater than the consensus will of the people.” Not to be outdone, President Trump posted that “He who saves his country violates no law.” 

Over the last few days, I’ve seen colleagues introduce Articles of Impeachment against federal judges because they don’t like judges who actually stand up to these violations of the Constitution, and now we’re seeing yet another plan to corrupt our judiciary take place. 

Let’s go back, Mr. Chairman, to the nonpartisan agreement that was brokered last Congress. We have no quarrel about the need for new judges. We all agree to it, but it’s got to be done in a way that it’s always been done. It’s done for the next administration when nobody knows who it’s going to help or who it’s going to hurt.

James Madison said in Federalist 47, “The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands, whether of one, a few, or many, and whether hereditary, self-appointed, or elective, may justly be pronounced the very definition of tyranny.”

Let’s avoid that. And I yield back to you, Mr. Chairman.