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Washington, D.C. (April 1, 2025)—Today, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, delivered opening remarks at a joint hearing of the Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence, and the Internet, and the Subcommittee on the Constitution and Limited Government, on Republican efforts to undermine the independent judiciary as Donald Trump wages an all-out assault against the Constitution and the rule of law.

Below are Ranking Member Raskin’s remarks at today’s hearing.

WATCH Ranking Member Raskin’s opening statement.

Ranking Member Jamie Raskin
House Judiciary Committee
Joint Hearing on “Judicial Overreach and Constitutional Limits on the Federal Courts”
April 1, 2025

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thanks to the witnesses for joining us today.

Why have 34 federal judges from 11 different districts, with a combined 474 years of service on the bench—judges appointed by Presidents Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump—entered 57 different preliminary injunctions and TROs against President Trump and Elon Musk’s executive orders and actions like the ones nullifying Constitutional birthright citizenship, unilaterally dismantling congressionally created agencies, or impounding and diverting funds appropriated by Congress?

Well, the Majority says it’s because these are radical judges, and they lead off with Judge Jeb Boasberg, the Chief Judge of the District Court of the District of Columbia, who enjoined the mass roundup and deportation of immigrants to an infamous El Salvadorean prison in peacetime without any due process at all, allegedly under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a statute explicitly limited to wartime and military invasion. 

Some of our colleagues have been railing against Judge Boasberg for ordering the planes to be turned around. They say those planes were filled with terrorists, I think my good friend from Texas said.

Well, here’s one person of many who wasn’t a terrorist on that flight or a gang banger. His name’s Kilmer Garcia. He’s a Marylander, married to a US citizen who is a 5-year-old son with autism. He went to pick up his son, but he was picked up first by ICE. And then he was shackled and put on that airplane and shipped off to the torturers of El Salvador without ever having the benefit of those two most beautiful words in the English language: due process. 

He never saw a judge. Nobody ever told him what he was being charged for. Nobody ever told him that there were any charges against him. And he was sent to a mega-prison run by the self-proclaimed dictator of El Salvador. And yesterday, you know what happened, Mr. Chairman? The Trump administration admitted that it had made a mistake. He was not actually a ‘gang banger.’ He was not a criminal. It was all a mistake. If there’d been due process, maybe that would have been determined, but there wasn’t. But they put him on that plane and he’s in El Salvador. 

Well, all’s well that ends well, right? No. The Administration says there’s nothing they can do about it now, because he’s no longer in U.S. custody. This guy who lives in my state, married to a U.S. citizen with citizen children, he’s stuck with the dictator of El Salvador.

Some of our colleagues, they’ve got “Wanted” signs in the Cannon House Office Building with the names and faces of judges on them. They want to impeach them now. They want to impeach Judge Boasberg. Some of my colleagues should be alerted to this fact. Judge Boasberg was first named to the bench by President Bush. He was Justice Kavanaugh’s roommate at Yale, known in legal quarters as a very conservative judge. But, they want to impeach him, because he stood up for the rule of law.

Democrats say all of these executive orders and actions are being struck down not because these are radical left, rogue judges, but because the judges—regardless of who appointed them—are doing their jobs. If the number of decisions striking down Trump illegality is unprecedented, it is only because the sheer number of illegal acts Trump has committed in the first 100 days is unprecedented. America’s never seen anything like it before in our entire history. 

Trump and Musk have been systematically violating the Constitution and breaking the law to trample the rights of the people and steal their data, fire federal workers en masse, and dismantle congressionally created government agencies and programs, from the VA and Medicaid to NOAA, NIH, and Social Security, which Elon Musk called the “biggest Ponzi scheme in history.” When brave Americans go to court to defend themselves against the President of the United States and the richest man in the world, these judges from across the political spectrum are showing up to work and showing America why we have an independent judiciary.

I’ve got to tell my friend Chairman Jordan that even if you campaign on doing something unconstitutional, like naming people kings and queens, or stealing other people’s money, no, that doesn’t make it constitutional, even if you campaigned on it. And the vast majority of the things here, I never heard of them campaigning on, but in any event, it’s irrelevant to the job of the courts.

Anyone who’s read any of the decisions knows that what we’re witnessing today is a matchless constitutional crime spree by a rogue president and his DOGE enforcer, a government contractor who has pocketed $38 billion from the taxpayers, multiples more than he has ever even claimed to have saved us. And we know how DOGE makes typos converting millions into billions. 

Read the decisions. Look at these cases, finding that Trump violated Congress’s spending power and usurped our lawmaking power under Article One. Read the cases, finding that Trump violated the First Amendment free speech rights, the Fifth Amendment due process rights, the Sixth Amendment counsel rights of the people, even by discriminating by name against law firms and lawyers, actually banning specific firms and lawyers from federal buildings and courthouses, federal contracts and federal employment, all simply because they dared to represent sent their clients, and Trump hates them. 

Now out of this mountain of cases, which I can only surmise our colleagues have not read, let’s zero in on Trump’s executive order contradicting the very first sentence of the 14th Amendment, which says that any person born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof is a citizen of the United States. Trump got struck down by a Reagan judge, a Biden judge, an Obama judge, and a Bush judge. The Reagan judge said, “I’ve been on the bench for four decades. I can’t remember another case where the question presented is as clear as this one. This is a blatantly unconstitutional order.” This is from a Reagan judge.

Now, my colleagues seem to think that an Executive Order is greater than a law or the Constitution itself. But an Executive Order cannot trump a federal statute, much less the Constitution. An Executive Order is just an order to the executive bureaucracy to follow a policy unless and until it’s countermanded by law, by the courts.

Many of our colleagues are following Trump and Musk in calling for impeachment right now. There have been only 15 federal judges impeached in all of American history, always for serious professional misconduct, like taking bribes, stealing from the court, or habitual drunkenness on the bench. Congress has never defined a doctrinal or interpretive disagreement as a high crime and misdemeanor, much less when the judge’s reasoning was airtight, correct. 

The spreading movement to impeach and attack judges is so alarming that Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts issued a rare statement last week. He wrote: “For more than two centuries, it has been established that impeachment is not an appropriate response to disagreement concerning a judicial decision.” The proper response, of course, is to appeal the decision.

To be fair, Chairman Issa expressed his strong disapproval of these “Wanted” posters yesterday in the Rules Committee. Now for some members, talk of impeaching the so-called rogue judges is just fun and games. But the vicious assaults the vicious rhetorical assault in the judiciary has turned into something more sinister in certain quarters: actual violent threats, bomb threats, direct intimidation. Judge Boasberg, the Bush appointee, must endure scandalous online attacks and insults by President Trump and Elon Musk and their followers. Even worse, the campaign of vilification has spread to Judge Boasberg’s family, including outrageous attacks on his daughter, who’s had her photo and her place of work posted on social media by Elon Musk to his 290 million followers. 

These threats follow in actual bomb threat made to the sister of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett. And there are numerous, numerous other threats taking place today. And of course, we’ve seen threats and actual violence and murders take place in the past. 

I call on my colleagues right now to call off the campaign to impeach federal judges for doing their jobs. I call on them to demand that the Trump Administration comply with all judicial orders while appealing whichever ones they want to appeal, and to demand the return of people unlawfully taken to El Salvador on that so-called plane full of ‘gang bangers.’ And I especially call on them today to denounce all violent threats, doxing, online vilification, and threats against our judges. This is the Judiciary Committee of the United States House of Representatives, and we should act like it. 

I yield back, Mr. Chairman.