Press Releases

Washington, D.C. (April 30, 2025)—Today, Rep. Jamie Raskin, Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, delivered opening remarks at the Full Committee markup of Republicans’ funding bill, a blank check for President Donald Trump’s authoritarian crusade that cuts funding for Americans’ healthcare, food assistance, and public safety—all to bankroll Trump’s tax cuts for billionaires and his cruel mass deportation agenda.

Below are Ranking Member Raskin’s remarks, as prepared for delivery, at today’s markup.

Below are Ranking Member Raskin’s remarks at the subcommittee hearing.

WATCH  Ranking Member Raskin’s opening statement

Ranking Member Jamie Raskin
House Judiciary Committee
Reconciliation Markup
April 30, 2025

It must be tough to be an authoritarian. You promise everybody the world to get elected—prices will go down on Day One! No more inflation! You’re going to end Russia’s war on Ukraine! The world is going to respect us!

Then you get in and, even though you inherit an economy from your predecessor that is described as the “envy of the world” by the Economist Magazine, you crash everything. The economy is shrinking, the stock market is sinking, inflation is soaring, you destroyed seven trillion dollars in American retirement savings and wealth by wrecking the stock market. And you have plunged us with your imbecilic tariffs into a trade war with the whole world except, of course, your bosom buddies in Russia.

So now, only 100 days in, with 100 unforced errors and policy blunders, you are the most unpopular president in 80 years. Barack Obama was at 69%, Ronald Reagan was 73%, Harry Truman was 87% and FDR was 68%.

But Donald Trump is at 39%, the lowest 100-day approval rating since polling began. His numbers are in the gutter. 

So now Trump reaches into the authoritarian playbook. Go back and please the wealthiest people and corporations in the country.

House Republicans want to cut tens of billions of dollars from Medicaid, food assistance for mothers and children, veterans’ benefits, Meals on Wheels, Head Start all in order to pay for another giant tax break for the President’s billionaire benefactors.

And here, in the House Judiciary Committee, House Republicans want to help Donald Trump use power in complete violation of the Constitution we have all sworn to uphold and defend against enemies foreign and domestic.  

Every day, the Administration uses immigration enforcement as a template to violate and erode our rights and liberties. They round up people in the street and disappear them to the torture prison of a foreign dictator without one iota of due process, sweeping up completely innocent people who have no criminal record and no criminal charges. They strip college and graduate students at American universities of their student visas for writing op-eds the Administration disagrees with. They invoke emergency wartime powers like the Alien Enemies Act to fight an invasion at the southern border while telling us that the border is already safer than it has ever been.

My colleagues say these extreme measures are necessary to deport gang members, violent criminals, “the worst of the worst.” But the Trump Administration is not targeting the “worst of the worst.” They’re arresting judges. They’re using federal agents to round-up law-abiding members of our communities with no criminal records, parents of American children, husbands and wives of American spouses—people who pose no threat to public safety. Agents are breaking into cars to arrest mothers as their children watch in terror. They’re arresting people who are coming in for their citizenship interviews. They are stalking churches, hospitals and schools, staking out people’s homes and trolling through IRS taxpayer data in search of tax-paying people to deport. They’re arresting and detaining people who are here legally. And they’re making serious mistakes along the way by trashing Due Process. 

We know how to remove people from the country who should not be here. We know how to it legally, consistent with the Bill of Rights, the Constitution, and the legal rights of every person in the United States. We have done it before under Democratic and Republican presidents.

The Trump Administration has abandoned the rule of law. If Donald Trump can sweep noncitizens off the street and fly them to a torturer’s prison in El Salvador with no Due Process, he can do it to citizens too, because if there is no Due Process, no fair hearing, you have no opportunity to object. And indeed, several American citizen children, including one with cancer, were flown to Honduras with no Due Process, as a Trump-appointed judge in Louisiana found.  

Now, the federal courts have issued more than 95 preliminary injunctions and Temporary Restraining Orders against this reign of lawlessness. But House Republicans want to enable President Trump’s worst instincts here as well. Instead of providing support for the judicial branch, this Judiciary Committee bill seeks to strip to strip the courts of their power to hold the Administration in contempt when the President violates court orders.

And it doesn’t stop there. While they try to defund the courts, they also are forking over an astonishing $81 billion dollars to the administration for more of their lawless and chaotic immigration roundups.

This legislation includes a whopping $45 billion for ICE – on top of its annual budget of roughly $9 billion overall – for family and adult detention centers alone.

This bill is a blank check to the Administration to do more of what we have already seen – mistakenly deporting people to a foreign prison. Sending masked agents with no identification to snatch students out of their neighborhoods, hauling them away in unmarked cars and sending them to a detention center across the country. Arresting people who show up for their citizenship interviews.

And to make matters worse, as Republicans race to spend more than $81 billion dollars on this lawlessness, Trump’s own Department of Justice is terminating hundreds of millions of dollars in grants—they’re cutting funding for local and county law enforcement, cutting funding for opioid addiction treatment programs, cutting funding for crime prevention programs and cutting funding for victims of violent crimes. 

These grants support local police in solving and preventing violent crime. They help the survivors of abuse and sexual assault navigate the legal system and connect them to the resources and support they need. They provide drug addiction treatment services and overdose prevention resources. Unless we restore this money today, the Administration is landing a savage blow against people who are really making our communities safer and taking care of victims.

And while they hamstring our police, House Republicans are also trying to handcuff the agencies that work to make sure our food and drugs are safe, and our air and water are clean.

The supercharged REINS Act is buried in this bill. It would prevent the government from enforcing our civil rights, protecting workplace safety, and guarding against misconduct by banks and financial institutions. It would require both houses of Congress and the President to approve EVERY major rule from our agencies to take effect—virtually guaranteeing no more regulatory action on any subject.

This bill also includes the Midnight Rules Relief Act. This measure would allow Republicans to bundle lots of midnight regulations and lots of others, including what you might call twilight, mid-day and early-morning regulations—indeed all of the regulations adopted in the final 365 days of the prior administration—into a single package and then vote them down as a single jumbo resolution. This tactic would, of course, only be used to hide the most destructive deregulatory votes among dozens of others.

This version of an authoritarian America is not what the American people want. 

If our Republican colleagues have any desire to walk back from the brink, then we urge you to support the amendments we plan to offer here today—amendments to restore funding for public safety, crime prevention, victim support services and other critical programs; and amendments to ensure that this Administration respects people’s constitutional rights, that it obey court orders, and use taxpayer funds in the way that Congress specifies.

 Today’s markup is a test for my Republican colleagues: will they continue to accept, without question, a President who holds himself above the law, threatening and silencing all who dare stand up to him? Or will they finally start to exercise our Congressional duties to use our power of the purse to serve as a check on the Executive—as the founders intended?

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I yield back.