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Washington, D.C. (March 4, 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’ legislative reforms to rig the rules for Trump and his corrupt cronies.

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 “Legislative Reforms to End Lawfare by State and Local Prosecutors”
March 4, 2025

Thank you, Mr. Chairman and welcome to all of our witnesses.

The Republicans call it “lawfare” when Donald Trump is held to the rule of law and given every right of due process. We call it “lawfare” when the Trump Administration violates the rule of law and tramples the due process rights of Americans, including prosecutors and FBI agents.

Mr. Chairman, we have no kings here, no queens, no titles of nobility, no serfs, no slaves. Our revolution overthrew monarchy and the established church. It made our Constitution supreme over the monarchical and oligarchical political ambitions of any man. The 13th and 14th Amendments abolished slavery and gave equal protection to all, royal status to none. But in our time, Donald Trump’s crime spree throughout American society has tested the hard-won principle that we are all equal and that no one is above the law.

The Supreme Court that Trump has repeatedly bragged about packing and stacking to destroy Roe v. Wade, not only brought the curtain down on the freedom and health security of tens of millions of American women trapped in GOP controlled anti-choice states. It also made the president absolutely immune from prosecution for crimes he commits under the so-called core functions of his office, presumptively immune from prosecution for other so-called official acts, and subject to prosecution only for private unofficial acts.

After more than two centuries, this bracing new taxonomy for licensing presidential criminality was announced by the Roberts Court in a 6-3 decision in U.S. v. Trump. It creates presidential exceptionalism, a plainly dangerous doctrine which overturned a unanimous ruling of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

But even that shocking burst of finger painting on the Constitution isn’t enough for Trump and his crowd who seek now complete immunity and impunity from the laws that bind the rest of us. It’s not even enough for them to appoint a nationwide crew of embarrassingly servile judges like Aileen Cannon, who may as well be on the bench in Putin’s Russia as she shows little fidelity to the rule of law, but fastidious devotion to the whims of her dear leader.

Now they want to pass something called the PEPPER Act to let Trump and his accomplices get their political corruption and election fixing cases removed from any state court in the land and put in front of far more submissive and pliant Trump appointees in federal court.

Donald Trump tried this move in one of his criminal cases, the one in New York City where he was found guilty of 34 felony criminal counts of falsifying business records to cover up hush money payments he had paid to a mistress before the 2016 election.

There his judge rejected his request to move everything to federal court, saying Trump had failed to meet both the current statutory and constitutional requirements for doing that. As Judge Hellerstein observed in his ruling: “The evidence overwhelmingly suggests that the matter was a purely personal item of the President—a cover-up of an embarrassing event. Hush money paid to an adult film star is not related to a President’s official acts. It does not reflect in any way the color of the President’s official duties.”

Removal to federal court is reserved for cases where there is an actual federal defense. Let’s say the president was tried in Florida state court for assaulting a citizen, but his defense was that the alleged victim was a soldier, and he was just administering fair punishment as commander in chief of the army in a time of actual conflict. In that hypothetical case, it would be removed, so the federal judiciary could handle the federal question defense.

There was plainly no federal question defense in Trump’s hush money record falsification scheme, but now scrambling to appease Trump—an incorrigible recidivist lawbreaker who is looking for a way to disappear all of his state court, civil and criminal prosecutions—our colleagues propose to amend the law so that a president or vice president or even a former president or vice president can remove a state, civil, or criminal prosecution to federal court whenever that case is brought “for or relating to any act while in office,” even if that act is completely private and personal nature, or where the state court’s consideration of the claim or charge may interfere with, hinder, burden, or delay the execution of the duties of the president or vice president.

This broad gaping language would in practice mean that no state court in America could ever conduct a criminal trial of Donald Trump or any other president again, even if the alleged conduct, say hypothetically, sexual abuse or criminal fraud, has no relationship to any of his official presidential acts. After all, any litigation can obviously hinder or burden the execution of an official duty. It would also permit Trump and his associates to remove the state court criminal cases now pending in Georgia related to the Trump conspiracy to overthrow the 2020 presidential election.

This bill is designed to trash basic jurisprudential principles, including federalism, that have served us well since the 18th century. The conceit behind it is the pathetic claim that Donald Trump is just profoundly misunderstood and a victim of the judicial process and a target of unfair prosecutions, although no court has ever once found that.

Yes, that Donald Trump, he’s the victim, according to our colleagues, the billionaire businessman who’s been involved in—check this out—more than 4,000 lawsuits, some in which he is sued as a defendant by, for example, frustrated students at Trump University or ex-mistresses or golf clubs alleging nonpayment or plumbers, painters, electricians, and small business contractors alleging failure to pay their contracts. But most of the ones I could find were ones in which he’s the plaintiff, deploying his army of lawyers to sue thousands of people and businesses, including casino patrons, real estate partners, business tenants, and media entities.

Most recently, he sued ABC and then CBS for $20 billion. But to hear our friends tell it, Donald Trump is just an Eagle Scout who respects women, would never cook the books and keeps his hands to himself. The Donald Trump I know about is a civilly adjudicated sexual abuser in New York, a convicted criminal felon, and the only twice-impeached president in American history, who was most recently impeached in this House for inciting an insurrection against the Constitution, the Congress, and his own vice president. The Senate voted 57-43 to convict him, meaning that although Trump narrowly beat the constitutional spread, robust bipartisan majorities voted that he had indeed incited insurrection against our government.

Now, look, if you want to see real lawfare, if that’s something really in your scopes, then open your eyes to the U.S. Attorney’s office here in the District of Columbia. The pro-January 6th insurrectionist-turned-U.S. attorney for D.C. Ed Martin has fired more than a dozen career prosecutors focused on violent crime from his office simply for doing their jobs and doing their jobs well.

He fired them because they had worked on the January 6th cases which they were assigned to do, prosecuting Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, and other extremists who violently assaulted our police officers, and they were sacked. Just last week, Mr. Martin demoted several other top prosecutors and career supervisors to entry level positions again as retribution for having simply done their jobs in overseeing January 6th prosecutions. That is lawfare. That is a violation of the due process rights as well as the civil service rights of American citizens who did nothing other than obey the law and do their jobs.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the Administration’s attacks on the rule of law. In its first month, from the corrupt quid pro quo in New York City with Mayor Adams, which led to the resignation of multiple Department of Justice lawyers, including the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District who had been a Justice Scalia clerk and a career-long member of the Federalist Society, and she said she couldn’t put up with that, and she decided to quit. Her assistant, another conservative lawyer who had clerked on the Supreme Court for Chief Justice Roberts, and he said you would have to be a “fool or a coward” to go along with that corrupt bargain between Donald Trump and Mayor Adams.

They have halted anti-corruption task forces. They’ve suspended enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. They have suspended anti-kleptocracy and anti-corruption initiatives, and on and on.

If you want to look at lawfare, let’s look at what’s going on right in front of our eyes today, Mr. Chairman. That’s what we should be doing instead of going after some imaginary lawfare by state and local prosecutors who did nothing other than their jobs, enforcing the law in their states, and not a single judge or appeals court or even the Supreme Court has said anything about those people doing anything remotely unethical.

I yield back.