Transcript: Rep. Jamie Raskin in Conversation with Lawrence Douglas
- So, good morning everyone. My name is Lawrence Douglas in the Department of Law, Jurisprudence and Social Thought and welcome to the first of three Point/Counterpoint events scheduled for this semester. This series of talks made possible by generous gift from members of the 50th Reunion Class of 1970. It supports public conversation in the hopes of bridging the partisan divides in our nation and helping us all to think more carefully about the important issues of the day. And this year's theme is Democracy at the Crossroads and I, for one, can't think of a person I'd rather discuss this with than Congressman Jamie Raskin. Congressman Raskin represents Maryland's 8th congressional district, educated at Harvard and Harvard Law. Raskin corrected his own educational missteps by shrewdly marrying an Amherst graduate, Sarah Bloom. And two of their three children, Hannah and the late Tommy Raskin, both graduated from Amherst. A professor of constitutional law at American University of Longstanding, Raskin served three terms as State Senator in Maryland before his election to Congress in 2016. In Congress, Raskin has quickly established himself as one of our nation's most vital, vibrant and inspiring elected officials. As the Lead House Manager in Donald Trump's second impeachment trial, Congressman Raskin presented the case for barring Trump from future office with outstanding intelligence, clarity, and moral force. As a member of the House Select Committee investigating the January 6th insurrection, he's worked tirelessly with his colleagues on both sides of the aisle to provide a gripping, granular and irrefutably truthful account of Donald Trump and his minions' elaborate effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election through fraud, intimidation, harassment, and violence. Through all this, and while battling personal tragedy, Congressman Raskin has acted with courage, wisdom, and decency. We are lucky to have leaders like him, few as they may be, who struggle to protect our democracy from the alarming and dangerous creep of authoritarianism. If he ever runs for president, he has my vote. Please join me- Well, I was gonna say, please join me in welcoming to Amherst College this morning. So the way things will work is, Professor Nishi Shah in the Philosophy Department and I will begin the discussion and then open things up to questions from you all. So thanks so much for coming out this morning. Nishi, do you wanna-
- Thank you.
- Yeah.
- Yep.
- Okay. So we're gonna start off with a really difficult question for you. We have a lot of first years here, a lot of first years in their first year seminars and their professors. Obviously, being a first year student is quite exciting, but it's also quite anxiety-ridden, as I clearly know. So I was wondering if you could share with us, thinking back to your first year, or maybe even your first semester at, not Amherst unfortunately, but at Harvard, if you have any memories of your first year that really stay with you.
- Hmm. Well, first of all, thanks for having me and thanks for-
- Oh yeah, absolutely.
- Thanks for doing this
- It's an honor.
- And thank you all for waking up. I'm assuming they had a choice, or is this an assigned class?
- Yeah, yeah.
- Okay. All right, well then, I take that back, so. No, thank you all for being here. Delighted to be in Amherst. Well, let's see, I... Well, I was sent off to college too young, I was 16 years old. That's like a form of child abuse, you know. I got to college and everybody was off, you know, getting drunk and losing their virginity and everything and I had my Star Wars lunch box And I was looking for the chess club and I thought I was gonna play football. So, yeah, I don't know. Did anybody get sent to college when they were 16? 'Cause if you... Oh, are you 16 now or no? Okay, so.
- 17.
- All right, well, if you're 16, tell them you'd like to take a year or two off and then come back, then it'll be better for you, so. But I don't know. I mean, I wish I... I mean, all three of our kids actually went to Amherst. Tabitha ended up transferring 'cause it was to bucolic and pastoral an environment for her here. But she wanted a big city, but everybody loved it. And the great thing is, you know, you get professors who really get to know you. Luckily, I got to know one professor in college and that was sheer good fortune because at a school like Harvard, it's kinda like you're on your own, you know? And so, I think I was telling you guys this morning, I felt like when I was in college, I ended up studying everything I already knew. Like, I was just reading Montesquieu and Locke and Hobbes and you know, Machiavelli for like the 50th time. And so, if you're not given any encouragement to go and explore, then you kind of end up falling back into what you already know. And so, I wish I'd been in a place where I'd gotten to know some professors better, who might have encouraged me to expand my horizons a little bit, and then maybe, you know, I'd be a musician or a Shakespeare scholar or something. But it is what it is, you know. So go and explore, I would say, go and explore. Tommy used to say, go and make friends with somebody you don't like. I like that, go make friends with somebody you don't like and go and study something you don't understand yet.
- Well, maybe getting to know people you don't like or getting to know someone, maybe you could-
- I've gotten good at that.
- Yeah, I was gonna say, maybe you could reflect a little about that in your experience in the Congress. Just another little question about your personal biography. Moving from academia first to the Maryland State House and then from the Maryland State House to Congress, I wonder if you could maybe just quickly tell us what surprised you or what that kind of experience was like?
- Well, I mean, this will resonate maybe with the professors here, but for me, it was sort of a shock going from being a professor where if you wanna get involved in public life, you can just pontificate and you can, you know, you can maintain your distance from actually having to engage with things, but you can comment and you can observe and you can demonstrate your addition and your cleverness, but you never have to really commit yourself in a fundamental way, and suddenly I was in politics and then people were not asking me to comment on some conflict, they were asking me to solve it, you know, or asking me like, well, what are you going to do about this? And that's a very different thing and so that's, you know, but that was, I think, a positive growth experience for me. That was one of the reasons I think I ended up wanting to leave academia, it was that distance from real responsibility, I guess, you know. Not saying you guys are immature or anything, But, you know, I think in academia, you've gotta remind yourself about the extraordinary privilege you've got and the extraordinary time and the resources and the benefit of, you know, having students and young people can help you research and think about things. And, you know, some professors take that responsibility really seriously and some less so, and some, you know, use their professorial perch and the enormous investment of social resources into that office, actually for negative purposes, for harmful purposes, to try to drive further wedges in the public
- Right.
- And to, you know, so. But I fundamentally miss being with young people, although I get to be with young people a lot, you know, in my office, and I get to go out and talk and I don't have to grade them, Which is good. But I suppose, you know, the thing that I would miss the most is the idea of, you know, unmotivated intellectual conversation where you can analyze ideas without it necessarily being anchored in a particular political or social conflict. But that's the great virtue of it, to have that kind of slack. But that's also what's dangerous about it, because you can go off down that road and, you know, 90% of the law review articles I look at now, and I just roll my eyes, they've got nothing to do with anything that anybody could ever use.
- Yeah.
- And I say 90% generously, you know,
- Right.
- Maybe 95. I don't know, so.
- Yeah. Well, in terms of social conflict, maybe we can talk a bit about the January 6th commission and as Professor Shah mentioned, there are a lot of first year students here, and one of the things that the commission has made very clear is that the events of January 6th were the culmination of a multi-pronged effort to overturn the 2020 election.
- Yes.
- So I was wondering if maybe you could just kind of lay out the degree to which it was multi-pronged.
- With pleasure, yeah. Yeah.
- I mean, it all started with one guy who could not take no for an answer from the American people. So what we see is successive attempts by Trump to try to overthrow Biden's majority in the electoral college. And I mean, there's no doubt that Biden beat him in the popular vote by more than seven million votes and there's no doubt that Biden beat him 306 to 232 in the electoral college, which was the exact same margin, coincidentally, that Trump had beat Hillary by in 2016, which Trump declared an absolute landslide in 2016. So then the question became, well, how do you reverse a presidential election? So the first step was, well, let's go to the legislatures and see if they'll just void out the popular vote and cast the electors for Trump, which was the most quasi lawful thing he attempted to do because arguably, the legislatures could do that under a reading of Bush v. Gore, which is that, you know, the legislatures maintain a plenary power over the award of electoral college votes under Article II of the Constitution. But that didn't work, and, you know, those Republican state legislative leaders to their credit basically said, that is an overthrow of democracy here. It's an overthrow, certainly of state laws, which they would've had to argue were unconstitutional, which required the legislature to appoint electors pursuant to the popular vote cast. When that didn't work, then they went out to the election officials of the country like Brad Raffensperger, and they basically said, would you just commit some election fraud? I mean, that's the Trump saying to Brad Raffensperger, lifelong Republican who maxed out to the Trump campaign. Just find me 11,780 votes, that's all I want. And you know, I'm a politician, that's all I want, 11,780 votes, give 'em to me but that clearly is election fraud, that's voter fraud. And when Raffensperger to his credit, didn't do it, they unleashed the mob on him, all kinds of death threats. His wife got a death threat on her phone saying, your whole family should be set up in front of a firing line and shot, and you know, we're gonna execute your husband and all that. But that technique did not work. So then they set about to go and create counterfeit electoral college slates in anticipation of January 6th. In the meantime, Trump's disgraced former national security advisor, Michael Flynn, who'd been forced to resign from his office after 17 days because of lying to Congress about his contacts with Russian government officials, including the Russian Ambassador of the United States, he had a plan. That plan was, we'll get the military to go out and seize the election machinery in the States, and then either find that there were Trump majorities, or if not, rerun the election because all of you know that provision in the Constitution, which allows the military to rerun the election when the President doesn't like the result. And when the Attorney General of the United States, Bill Barr, who was as an obsequious and loyal a supplicant to Donald Trump as you could find in the administration, when even he said, no, you can't do that, and the White House Council told him, you can't do that, well then everything became focused on January 6th, which had basically two tracks to it and one track was, we're gonna get Vice President Mike Pence to step outside of his constitutional role under the 12th Amendment and just declare unilateral lawless power to vaporize electoral college votes from Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania. And then by getting rid of those electoral college votes, then Biden's total will fall below 270 and at that point, there was a fork in the road that could go one of two ways, either we'll just declare Trump the victor or more legalistically, we'll pursue a so-called contingent election under the 12th Amendment. We'll say nobody has a majority and we'll kick it to the House of Representatives and why would they want it in the House of Representatives with Speaker Pelosi and a bunch of liberal Democrats in control? Well, they understood that under the 12th Amendment, in the event that there's no majority in electoral college, the House votes on the principle not of one member, one vote the way we usually vote, but one state and one vote and they had 27 state delegations after the 2020 elections. We have 22 states, and Pennsylvania is split down the middle nine to nine, and so they're off the side 27-22. So even had they suffered the defection of my new best friend in Congress, the at-large representative from Wyoming, Liz Cheney, they still would've had a 26 vote majority and they would've been able to declare it. And at that point, the plan was, as far as I can make it out, but we're still waiting for the deposition of the former president to see what exactly he had in mind, but basically the idea was he would arrive like Mussolini on the shoulder of the mob, come in, and then either through A or B, declare himself President, accept the presidency, declare martial law by invoking the Insurrection Act, call in the National Guard, which had been withheld for most of the day to put down the insurrectionary chaos that they'd unleashed against Congress and the Vice President and then blame the whole thing on Antifa, which a lot of them, including Trump still do, even though we haven't been able to find a single person associated with Antifa who was there that day. But that was basically the plan. And the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers in this relatively well-coordinated effort were out there looking for Antifa, saying, Antifa, where are you? Because they were looking for that one photo of the two sides squaring off that would become, you know, the pretext for invoking martial law in the country. So that was basically the multi-pronged plan. I mean, there were, you know, other subplots in there and different things going on, but that was basically it and you can see how every nook and cranny in our antiquated electoral college system became an opportunity to try to throw the election. And, you know, I think in almost any other democratic country in the world, people would be saying, my God, we gotta get rid of this electoral college system but we're somewhat frozen by the fact that we have people from small states who still, counter to all history, believe that the electoral college helps them, which it doesn't. I mean, Congresswoman Cheney for one, as a former or as a representative from Wyoming, thinks that somehow Wyoming has benefited by it. But Wyoming is just a safe red state, which is ignored by both Republican and Democratic candidates and campaigns, just like my state, Maryland is a safe blue state, and most people live in safe red or blue states and are complete flyover country in terms of the electoral college because we know where they're flying to, to Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Florida, a handful of states. We spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year exporting American democracy and voting rights theory to people around the world and one thing they never come back with is, you know, one thing we'd really like to import from your country is your electoral college system. That really makes a lot of sense. In 2022, it's time for us to elect the president the way we elect governors, senators, mayors and everybody else. Whoever gets the most votes wins and every vote counts equally, so.
- Yeah, hear hear. Let me just ask you something about January 6th. In this, among other things, you are also an author and Congressman Raskin recently published this book, "Unthinkable," which is a really terrific book and I urge you to run out and get not just one copy, but multiple copies and you described the events of January 6th, and one thing that becomes clear, it really wasn't until that day that you were confident that Vice President Pence was not going to do the bidding of the President.
- Right.
- Were you prepared for the eventuality that Pence was going to defy his constitutional obligation? And what kind of preparations did you have for that eventuality?
- Well, I mean, I could see what was coming in terms of the coercive pressure being mobilized against Pence to step outside of his constitutional role and proclaim these, you know, awesome new powers. And I was picking up enough intimations from... I mean, the great thing about Donald Trump is, I mean, he's utterly lawless and ungovernable, he's like a one man crime wave, But he always signals to you in advance what he's gonna do, you know. So, you know, through projection and other psychological mechanisms, you can figure out where he is going and he was saying enough stuff, like he said to the Department of Justice, Well, just describe it as a fraudulent election and leave it to me and my friends in the House and you could see where he was going. And I didn't know what Pence would do. I mean, for four years, he demonstrated nothing more than invertebrate sycophancy towards his boss and I thought, wow, I mean, it could go in either direction here, but he was a constitutional patriot on that day and he did his job, and, you know, hey, in a time of scoundrels and such malicious political activity, we have to thank him just for doing his job. But that presented the most difficult scenario as we were getting ready for different things
- Yeah.
- That would happen. A lot of what I had been preparing as part of this little group that Speaker Pelosi had tasked with getting ready for January 6th was answering the objections to particular states. So, you know, more than 60 federal and state courts rejected every claim of electoral fraud and corruption, which made it, it made it tedious but easy to prepare because we just had to read these cases rejecting all of the claims that they might raise on the floor. But, you know, in the event that Pence did try to pull some kind of sneak attack on the whole constitutional order, we were prepared with the parliamentarian to explain how the Vice President lacked the power under both the 12th Amendment and the Electoral Count Act to unilaterally count electoral college votes by not counting them and that this was essentially an attack on the electoral college votes coming in from Arizona and Georgia and Pennsylvania and Michigan, the other states that they were targeting. So we were ready, but the truth was, we didn't quite know, I mean, like everything else in Trump time, it's totally unprecedented. I mean, there's no, it's all a case of first impression. Nobody's done it before. So you don't have a lot to fall back on but, you know, we would say, well, for more than two centuries, no vice president has ever attempted that, nobody's ever believed it. And their answer was simply right, well, we don't know you can't do it because nobody's ever tried it before,
- Yeah.
- You know, and that's so much the nature of the law of these times. I mean, when you look at the foreign emoluments clause about, you know, the President of the United States collecting millions of dollars from foreign governments at his hotels and country clubs and licensing deals and all of that kind of stuff and they'd say, well, the ban on the president accepting that is just for himself, but not for his corporation, which has a different juridical identity, you know, and so this is what has made it so difficult. Like, if people don't use law for the purposes of justice advanced in a common sense way, you can make any kind of argument you want and I think a lot of lawyers have disgraced themselves. Some have actually been disbarred or suspended like Rudy Giuliani from New York, but I think there were seven or eight cases where judges just said, you are bringing in gibberish, you are bringing in nonsense here and sanctioning people for doing it. But they were bringing cases just because Donald Trump wanted them to, and he had the money to pay the lawyers.
- Yeah.
- So in your book, you call yourself, if I recall, a clear eyed but radical optimist about the future of the country. I wish I could feel the same way, so what I'm gonna do is provide you with the case for pessimism that is-
- 'Cause I don't hear that enough, yes, please.
- But then I want you to persuade me that, 'cause I want to be optimistic.
- Yes, yes, yes.
- So going back to your committee, the January 6th committee, I thought you told a riveting, compelling case about what happened and who was responsible. And as you've said before, it wasn't like an Agatha Christie novel, you know, we all knew who'd done it, but you told it extremely well, the evidence was completely compelling. However, the Trump's, just starting with one fact, Trump's favorability rating before any of the hearings is exactly the same, pretty much, as it was then. It is now what it was then. If that's not bad enough, today, there was a New York Times poll that just came out and let me just read you some of, what I took to be the very depressing results.
- Please.
- 71% of all voters said democracy was at risk. Not bad, but just 7% identified that as the most important problem facing the country. 71% of Republicans said that they would be comfortable voting for a candidate who thought that last year's election was stolen, as did 37% of independents and even 12% of Democrats, and even among voters who think Biden won legitimately, 19% were comfortable casting a ballot for a candidate who believed the election was stolen. And that number includes 10% of Democrats, 22% of independents and 43% of Republicans who believed that the election was legitimate. If that's the state we're in, where the best case you can give doesn't move the needle, isn't our country in a bad, bad situation? Isn't this... Doesn't this spell a kind of doom for our country?
- No. No, no. You know, okay, well let me start with this. First of all, it was interesting that huge numbers of the country now see that democracy is under siege.
- Right, but they don't care.
- Okay. They didn't say they didn't care. They said, if I'm hearing you correctly, they didn't list it as their number one
- Right.
- Priority. But look, I mean, you guys, they still study Abraham Maslow? Maslow's hierarchy of need? I mean, if you can't make ends meet, you can't afford to get to work because your brake lights are on and your brakes aren't working, but you can't afford $400. That is more important than the state of democracy, you gotta solve that problem, right? So people are dealing with real world problems and that's always been the case with respect to democracy. I mean, when our country was founded, you know, Paine estimated a third of the people were really for the revolution, a third of the people were still monarchists and for the crown and a third were kind of, you know, playing both sides, which you see that in Capitol Hill a lot, I mean, and people can, you know, blow with the wind. So you're just talking about human nature there. Look, I mean, optimism is an act of will. What did Gramsci say? You've gotta maintain pessimism of the intellect, you gotta read all the polls, but optimism of the will, that's what really matters, what you're gonna do. I mean, my dad used to say to us when we were growing up, when everything looks hopeless, you're the hope, right? It's not your job to sit around and read all the public opinion polls. When I first ran for the State Senate and all my kids were with me and Tommy introduced me, it was back in 2006, I ran for the State Senate and I was the longest of the long, darkest of the dark horses, longest the long shots, you know, and I was running against a 32-year incumbent who was President pro tem of the Maryland Senate and I went outside and I, you know, I laid out everything I wanted to do that the incumbent was opposed. We wanted to pass marriage equality, we wanted to abolish the death penalty, we wanted to decriminalize marijuana, we wanted to pass tough anti-drunk driving laws, you know, you can imagine my, you know, and a woman came up to me afterwards and she said, Jamie, great speech, I loved your speech, but one thing, you gotta take out everything you got in there about gay marriage 'cause it's never gonna happen, you know it's not gonna happen, even the gay candidates don't talk about it. And it makes you sound like you're really extreme, like you're not in the political center. And I just have such a clear memory of Tommy looking at me, he was sitting right there to see how I would respond to this woman 'cause it was like 10 degrees below zero, it was freezing cold and I didn't have that many attendees at my kickoff rally that day, so I didn't wanna offend her. But I said, you know, I appreciate what you're saying, I wanna thank you for that because it makes me realize that it's not my ambition to be in the political center, which blows around with the wind. It's my ambition to be in the moral center and to try to figure out what's right the best we can and bring the political center to us and if you get into politics, that's what your job is, is not to follow the public opinion polls. The whole point of political leadership is to change public opinion and politics at its best is about education, educating people about the process, about the rules, about people's rights, people's responsibilities, and then what the issues are and what kind of progress we can make.
- Well, just one little follow up- So I worry that people, like as compelling a case as you made, given that the guy who done it, the favorability rating hasn't changed at all, we failed to educate and I thought what you said in the book about the main aim of the committee was really interesting. You talked about the role, it had to do with the role of memory in a democracy, in a healthy democracy and I wonder if you could just speak a little bit about that.
- Well, you know, we're seeing these atrocious laws being passed or introduced all over the world, which are basically an attack on history. I mean, in Poland and Hungary today, you can't talk about the complicity of those regimes with Nazi Germany. You must portray them as innocent and there was no acquiescence or collaboration with the Nazis. That's like an anti-memory law. It's like in America, you can't teach critical race theory by which they mean just the history of the country. You can't teach the doctrine that one race is superior to another, which was the law in America under the Dred Scott decision, where Justice Taney alas of Maryland rendered a decision for the whole Supreme Court saying, there were a couple dissenters, but saying that no, Dred Scott does not, there's no jurisdiction to hear the case because Dred Scott cannot be a citizen within the meaning of the diversity jurisdiction clause and so, he can't even get into court to have it heard and then proceed for 300 pages to describe how the constitution is a White man's compact and that the African slaves and their descendants have no rights that the White man is bound to respect. You can't teach that doctrine, even though it was part of the history, a central feature of the history of the country, because that might hurt someone's feelings if they were to learn that White supremacy was in fact the law in America. I mean, how absurd and ridiculous is that, and that's what they call critical race theory. I mean, you don't need critical race theory, you just need some critical race facts, you know. But that's, it is critical race facts that they're trying to delete and nullify right now. So to me, I, you know, my book, which chronicles 50 days in my life from our loss of Tommy, the last day of 2020 through the January 6th, and the assault on the capital where I was and where, you know, I was acting on the floor and where our daughter Tabitha and our son-in-law, Hank, who's married to our older daughter, Hannah, who's an Amherst grad too, they were there. They were there and then through the impeachment and then my being the leader of the House Impeachment Managers, that... It's all an attempt to just, you know. I mean I couldn't sleep anyway, I'd been suffering insomnia intensely since we lost Tombo. And you know, I figured I'd probably spend the rest of my life reliving and trying to understand these 50 days if I didn't try to commit them to paper and tell the story of what we had just experienced and so, that's what the book is.
- Yeah.
- And also just in terms of, I mean, it strikes me that one of the other important things that the commission is trying to do, in addition to present such an incredibly powerful document establishing the effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election, is to offer proposals to protect and fortify our electoral system. So I wonder if you could maybe talk about some of those. I mean, you've mentioned already that it would be wonderful to push a button and get rid of the electoral college, but seems very unlikely that that's going to happen. So I wonder if you could talk about some of the efforts to fortify our electoral system.
- Well, just on the electoral college, actually, the very first bill I introduced as a State Senator when I got elected was for the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact, which is an agreement among the states once we get 270 electors represented in the coalition to cast our electors, not for the winner of the popular vote in our state, but for the winner of the popular vote nationally and we're more than halfway there. Massachusetts has joined it, New York, California, we have 15 states that are part of it in the District of Columbia. So we're about two thirds of the way there but unfortunately, this, like everything else, has become mired in just the partisan mud. Donald Trump used to be on our side about this. He said that the electoral college made us the laughing stock of the world and it's a ridiculous way to do it. Then after the 2016 election, when Hillary beat him by three million votes, but he won in electoral college, he discovered some heretofore misunderstood virtues of the system and decided to stick with it. But so, we are on a path to do it, it has gotten more difficult, it's true and once we do it, I think it will work great and we'll amend the Constitution. And that's been our history, which is that the political change generally bubbles up from the states like, you know, 19th Amendment, women's suffrage, it was preceded by lots of states just granting women the right to vote and after those states did it, then Congress finally saw the logic of it and said, let's just go ahead and amend the Constitution. Same thing with 18-year-old voting in the 26th Amendment. So look, we have a whole array of problems that confront us now and the way I think of it is we have the majority will, which is an overwhelming majority will, which is pro-democracy, pro-freedom, pro-choice, pro-progress, pro climate action, all of those things and then we've got a minority and a shrinking minority, which is opposed to all of it, but they are expert at manipulating levers of anti-democratic power, the voter suppression statutes, the gerrymandering of our federal and state legislative districts, the manipulation of the filibuster, which is not in the Constitution, it's not in federal law, it's a rule of the Senate. It's riddled with exceptions already, more than a hundred exceptions I could count, the Trade Adjustment Act, the Budget Reconciliation Act, judicial confirmations, all of those things, there have been little exceptions carved out to it, you know, and we need an exception for voting rights. We need an exception for democracy. We need an exception for gun safety. We need an exception for reproductive freedom. So that's very much on the ballot in 2022. Not being partisan because I know I've been strictly nonpartisan up to this point. But you know, that is the importance of the Democrats winning two more Democratic senators who will act like Democratic senators, right? So, you know, I'm with John Dewey who said that the only solution to the ills of democracy is more democracy and what we're suffering from in America today is not democracy, it's these impediments and obstacles to democracy because go with the wisdom of the crowd. Most Americans are gonna put us in the right posture. We're not a racist country, we're not an anti-Semitic country, we're not a misogynistic country that greets women by grabbing them when they meet them. All of that stuff, that's an artifact of this Trump derangement period we've been in. But that's not where the majority of the American people are. So we need to clear away the cobwebs and some of them are sub-constitutional, like all these voter suppression tactics, like being able to repair the damage to the Voting Rights Act that was done by the Supreme Court in Shelby County v. Holder. Some of them can be done with federal laws like the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, the We The People Act, where we tried to get rid of the gerrymandering and move in every state to independent redistricting commissions and some of it is constitutional in nature ultimately, and will require some constitutional change. But you know, we know how to do that. You know, if you read the Constitution the way I do, we've had 17 Amendments since the original Bill of Rights. The vast majority of them have been efforts to correct anti-democratic filters that were put in at the beginning of the Constitution and to expand the suffrage, expand the franchise and Voting Rights Act. So 13th Amendment abolishes slavery, 14th Amendment gives us equal production due process, 15th Amendment says no race discrimination in voting, 17th amendment shifts the mode of selection of U.S. senators from the legislatures to the people, 19th Amendment doubles the franchise with women's suffrage, 23rd Amendment gives people the right to vote regardless of sex, right, women's suffrage, 24th Amendment abolishes poll taxes, 26th Amendment lowers the voting age to 18. That is the real trajectory of American political and constitutional development in progress in the country and Tocqueville saw it. He said that in America, democracy and voting rights are either shrinking or they're growing and we've gotta get back on the growth track today. We need a universal constitutional right to vote at every level of government and we need, you know, we've added 37 states because achieving statehood is the way to achieve political equality and membership in the country. We got 713,000 tax paying draftable citizens who live in Washington, D.C. Anybody from Washington out there? Anybody? Well, you know, it's time for D.C.'s statehood, okay, to make them part of- Make them part of the country, you know, and when the House has passed it twice, I was the floor leader last time, I got up, I said, I wanna thank the people of Washington D.C. who have a real political grievance, not an imaginary one, and didn't come down here and beat the hell out of our police officers and hit 'em over the head with steel poles and Confederate battle flags and Trump flags. They did it the right way. They got together and they wrote a statehood constitutional, they wrote a statehood constitution, and they've petitioned for admission to the union and we got three and a half million American citizens living in Puerto Rico who've been tasting the bitter price of colonial second class citizenship in all these hurricanes, and Hurricane Maria, where they got cheated out of hundreds of millions of dollars of aid and Donald Trump threw some paper towels at them. You know, let's keep American democracy moving forward and that was my major critique of Joe Biden's speech the other day defending democracy and he was absolutely right to make it, and it was a really good speech. But he didn't point out that democracy is not just a static set of institutions and practices. It always has a spirit that's moving forward to recognize everybody's equality, to get us closer to a more perfect union. That's what's the real exceptional genius of American institutions. It's not, what makes us exceptional is not that we're somehow immune to fascism and racism and authoritarianism. We're not, we came this close on January 6th. What makes us exceptional is the determination of the people to make the march of democratic freedom go forward for everybody and to recognize everybody's rights and everybody's equality.
- Mm-hmm, actually, can I just follow up with, yeah, I mean, hear hear. I mean, one thing that really struck me in your book is you mentioned that Donald Trump used the extremist, but you also say the extremist used Donald Trump.
- Yes.
- And I wonder if we could maybe have a two-part question about that. One is, I think there have been 919 people who have been so far charged with crimes from the day of the insurrection. One person obviously has been charged with nothing, is Trump himself. Now, I'm not gonna ask you, I mean, obviously the commission can't, the committee cannot issue indictments. But I wonder if you could maybe talk about the possible risks and rewards of trying the president and then maybe also to just think about the larger threat of extremism in this country for which Donald Trump is almost kind of a figurehead or placeholder, but exists whether we have a Trump or not.
- So, I think it's cardinal to the rule of law that the rule of law applies equally, neutrally, comprehensively to everybody and you know, in fact, the people who were saying, no, don't convict him at trial and disqualify him from ever being able to hold office again were saying, well, just use the criminal justice process if he committed crimes. Now those people are saying, prosecute a former president?
- Right, right.
- Horrors, horrors. You know, there are constitutions on Earth which say, a former president can never be prosecuted. Ours is not one of them. You know what you call a former president in America? A citizen. That's the highest office in the land, and those of us who aspire and attain a public office are in the first place, nothing but the servants of the people. And no, you don't have a right just because you're an elected official to go murder somebody or rape somebody or steal money from people or cheat, no, you don't. All of that is still a crime, even though you've got, you know, the honorable before your name when you get a letter sometimes. You know, so that just strikes me as so basic, and I mean, Donald Trump's a magician the way he's able to pull the wool over people's eyes. It's remarkable the way he can get otherwise smart people really thinking that, oh yeah, well you couldn't prosecute a former president for rape and murder and assault. No, you couldn't do that, that's a former president. Why not? Why not? It just, it doesn't make any sense. If you violate the law, then you get prosecuted. So you know, all this thing about special standards and so on, I just think it's nonsense. And you know, we, like Pence said, we have no kings here, we have no queens here. The constitution bans titles of nobility for a reason. We have no nobles here, we separate church and state. You know, even people who are high ranking members of particular churches only get one vote here and still have to obey the law like everybody else. Although there's sometimes confusion about that, they'd like to pull the wool over people's eyes. Oh, well you think that so and so, you know, representative of a particular religion may have committed a crime like a rape or child sexual assault or whatever. Well, before you go to the police or the prosecutors, you've gotta take it through church procedures. You do? No, you don't. I mean, you know, what was the genius of the American constitution? The separation of church and state, to get away from all of that stuff. I mean, our founders were enlightenment liberals who broke from centuries of religious dogma and superstition and holy crusades and inquisitions and witchcraft trials and all of it. And Madison said, you know, the question of religious faith is between you and God in a democratic society. It's between you and your God if you believe in your God and whatever you call your God and we do not impose religious dogmas through government and through the state. And for the same reason, much less should we be imposing other forms of superstition and dogma through the state. But this is the whole Trump phenomenon, it's conspiracy theory and disinformation and mass delusions, which are supposed to be the basis of government for them and that's the exact opposite of what Jefferson and Franklin and Madison and even Hamilton, who was pretty soft on monarchy, even he was very tough on that question of the separation of church and state. Then that's allowed us to become a very religious country because it's a free market, anybody can go create their own religion, obviously, and that's great and you can do it. But also, the government itself proceeds on principles of science and reason. People can bring their own values to the discussion but we don't impose religious dogma on people. And you know, that's a very important principle that needs to be restated. I mean, pretty much on a daily basis, I have colleagues who will get up on the floor and they say, well, you know, Engel v. Vitale in 1962 when the Supreme Court struck down compulsory religious prayer in the New York public schools, that was the beginning of the moral downfall of America. They say, when the Supreme Court banned prayer in the public schools and I always get up and I say, well, first of all, the Supreme Court didn't ban prayer in the public schools. As long as there are pop math quizzes, there will be prayer in the public schools, okay? Anybody can pray whenever he or she wants to pray. It's just that the government cannot force you through the principals or the teachers to recite a religious script that they compose, which is what the Supreme Court said in 1962 and that's still controversial today. And you know, we've got people like Marjorie Taylor Green and Matt Gaetz running around saying, America is a Christian nation, you know, it's back to that. So we've gotta stand strong for the principle of liberal democracy. I forgot your second question.
- Well, it was just, it was about trying him and extremism, but maybe Nishi and then we'll wanna open it up quickly to the, yeah.
- Yeah, yeah.
- So let me ask a question more about our past than our future.
- Okay.
- I think you got into politics, was it 2007 in the Maryland Senate?
- Well, that's when I got elected, but yeah, I got into politics 2006.
- Even before that. So you've been part of the Democratic Party for quite a while.
- Yeah, well, my whole life.
- Particularly through a period where we elected Barack Obama twice, and then we got a moral monster, and we might get a moral monster again and I'm curious what, given that you've been in the Democratic Party throughout this period, whether you think the explanation at least in part involves failures by the Democratic Party, if not in principles, then at least in their practice of politics, do you think there are maybe any decisions that the Democratic Party has made over this period that maybe they should have done things a little differently?
- Well, of course. I mean, that's in the nature of politics, that's in the nature of life to have regrets about decisions that people made and so on. But it's important to try to analyze them. I mean, if you look at what happened in 2016, for example, Hillary did beat Trump by more than three million votes, okay? So let's not pretend it was some kind of landslide election. It was not, but having said that, I mean, someone like Donald Trump should have been beaten by 50 million votes, it never should have been that close. Donald Trump, from my analysis, essentially ran to Hillary Clinton's left in the Midwest in the places where the White working class has been besieged by trade deals and corporate power and so on. I mean, he attacked Hillary Clinton for collecting whatever, $250,000 from Goldman Sachs and hanging around with the Wall Street people. He attacked the Clintons for NAFTA in the free trade agreements. He said that they would get us into Middle East wars, he would not do that and so on. I mean, there's not a lot of ideological coherence in American politics and a lot of people said, oh, well, the stuff that he's saying makes some sense and Hillary was running a very cautious, conservative seeming campaign. And a lot of people just said, well, we're, you know, in Indiana and Illinois and Michigan and Ohio, well, you know, we feel like we've been getting the raw end of the stick for a long time and screw it, let's just knock over the whole chess table. So I think there's some reality there. Now, I mean, that's a progressive analysis and I generally come from the progressive wing of our party, but that is the way that I see it. I think that, again, I'm looking for things to, you know, beat ourselves up about. I mean, I think that there is, when you look at the extremism in the lunacy that's taking place in the Republican Party today with people like Herschel Walker, you know, who's running on a pro-life ticket and you've got his girlfriends, or I don't even know what the status of their relationship is, but you know, they're saying, he urged me to get an abortion and paid for the abortion, and here's the receipts and, you know, and they stick by him even though they're describing abortion as murder and a holocaust in the country and they're trying to take away the right of abortion. I mean, it's just absolute lunacy what's taking place in the country, and you ask, well, how can so many people be voting for somebody like him or Dr. Oz or Donald Trump? I think that there is something to the idea that they have correctly depicted the feelings that people have about what they consider to be morals, kind of moral snobbery in the country by liberals who, you know, whose politics might be a million miles wide in terms of knowing all the right words and all the right language, but like, a centimeter thick and not really having a depth of understanding of other people's experience. And so, I think we got to, we have to have a series debate amongst ourselves about the thing called political correctness. And the project I've got, I've turned my campaign into Democracy Summer, which is just for young people to come on out and talk about the history of the country and learn about how to organize and register people to vote and do digital organizing and so on. I say, we're gonna try to replace political correctness, which is about judging other people's language and attitudes and so on, with political courage and political courage, PC, is going out and meeting people you don't know, who have not had the same life experience that you've had, who have not had the same advantages you've had necessarily, and learning from them and then building a broader and deeper progressive politics, progressive populous politics. That's what I favor, and so I think that we need to re-inject some more perspective about that. I mean, it's a relatively tiny thing compared to beating up police officers and trying to steal elections and knocking over the government. But, you know, nobody's perfect and we should understand that that has become a political problem for the progressive side of the equation. If you go back and read Donald Trump's first announcement speech in 2016, it was all about denouncing political correctness and these people don't like the way we speak and they don't like the way we eat. I mean, what a fraudulent, phony exercise that is coming from a billionaire elitist from New York who has nothing but contempt for the people he tricks every single day. But you know, those feelings are out there and he's a master at manipulating them.
- I want to open this up, the last thing I wanted to say is, you mentioned your Democracy Summer project. Now, is that something that would be available to Amherst College students?
- Yes, on a completely partisan basis. I mean, it's not a 501c3 or anything.
- Right.
- It's my campaign. So we go out and we fight for Democrats to win because whatever our faults, our imperfections and our flaws, the Democratic Party is the party of democracy in America today, we are, and we need to be improving and we need to be moving forward. But, you know, sometimes in the Judiciary Committee, my GOP colleagues, they can't seem to correctly pronounce the name of our party in its adjectival form. So they'll say, you know, that Democrat congresswoman with her Democrat bill and her Democrat amendment and for years I was just saying, Well, no, you know, when it's an adjective, you've gotta say the Democratic congresswoman, the Democratic bill, you know, I would take them aside and so on but they still kept doing it. So, about a month ago, I exploded and I just said, you know what, you guys have this self-appointed political speech impediment and it's contagious. Now I've got one, every time I open my mouth to say the name of your party comes out the Banana Republican Party with the Banana Republican congressman. And so, Sarah chastised me for that. She said, that's immature. So I came up with a better solution, I finished this great book about Roosevelt called "Traitor To His Class" by H.W. Brands and I noticed something interesting, which is that when Roosevelt talked about our party, he didn't call us the Democratic Party, much less the Democrat Party. He called us the Democracy. So he would say, you know, the royalists and the plutocrats say invest in the very wealthiest corporations in America, and some of the wealth will drip down on everybody else, but the Democracy says, invest in the vast middle class of the country, we'll all rise and prosper together. He said, that's the doctrine of the Democracy. So at this point, I think we should take that back and we should call ourselves the Democracy until at least they wanna fight us for the title. But right now, they're with the autocrats, the theocrats and the kleptocrats.
- Yeah, sure, yeah.
- That's who they are. And that's Lincoln's party and I've got a bust of Lincoln on my desk, I inherited from my grandfather, but the party of Lincoln, which was an anti-slavery, anti-racist party as far as you could go in those days, anti no nothing, pro-immigrant party has become a cult of authoritarian personality.
- Yeah, yeah.
- And the political scientists tell us, what are the hallmarks of a fascist party? One, a cult of personality with a charismatic figure who dictates to everybody what to think. Two, they refuse to accept the results of democratic elections if they don't go their way and three, they embrace political violence or refuse to disavow political violence. So they all got mad at Joe Biden for saying that there were, you know, elements of the Republican Party, the mega part of the party was semi-fascist. But if the shoe semi fits,
- Yeah.
- You semi wear it, you know.
- Yeah, absolutely right. So let's try to open this up for some questions. I see your hand right there. I think you want to go to the mic over there because this is being livestream, so we need...
- Right, well, hi Congressman Raskin, thank you so much for joining us. This is sort of along this same vein as like Professor Shah's contention earlier, but you say like, the main point of politics is to educate the masses and if you look at those polls-
- I didn't say the masses, but I did say to educate.
- To educate, yeah.
- 'Cause we're all the masses.
- Yeah.
- Yeah, precisely. But if you, like, I kind of read that figure 70%, 70 something percent of people agree that democracy is under attack but I wonder what percentage of those people think that because they think that, you know, Joe Biden and the Democrats have stolen the election and that Trump really should be the president. I just think that like-
- That's a more pessimistic reading of the poll than actually,
- Yeah.
- My point-
- I got you, I gotcha, I see where you're going with that.
- At what point does the effort to, you know, make sure that history sort of remembers what was done on January 6th? At what point does that like cement the belief of, you know, about half the country that the election was stolen from them and that-
- Well, that's a great question. I mean, that's a very astute political question you're asking, really. You're saying, is it better... Should we have just left well enough alone? But I don't think so because the struggle for democracy is the struggle for the truth, you know? And to the extent that the autocrats base their politics on lies and big lies, we small d democrats here, and I'm trying to speak as ecumenically as possible, we small d democrats have got to base our politics on the truth, and it's a lot more complicated. It's a lot easier to lie to people. I mean, that's the whole technology of the big lie. I mean, that's how the totalitarians adopted it. That's why fighting for democracy and freedom is much more difficult than just lining everybody up and say, everybody just repeat the same lies. This week, we're gonna blame the immigrants. Next week, we're gonna blame critical race theory. The next week, we're gonna say, you know, the Democrats stole the election and so on, and just let that lies all congeal together. But so I think fundamentally, I can see what you're saying that tactically, maybe it's better sometimes to just say, all right, rather than get them to harden their position, we should just leave it alone. But I've ordered every book that there is on religious cults and deprogramming and everything, and what they say is, one, you must insist on the absolute truth and what facts are versus lies when you're trying to get somebody out of a cult. And two, you've gotta show them maximum concern and affection. And I thought about Lincoln when I read that about the bonds of affection which underlie, you know, the vitriol of political party rule. So to get somebody out of a cult, you gotta show them you care about them, you remember who they are, but you do have to be emphatic about what's true and what's not true.
- Thank you.
- Thank you.
- Yeah.
- Speaking of cults, was Ginni Thomas really in a cult?
- She was in a cult, yeah. She was in a cult, I think it's called Lifespring. You can look it up, and she talked about what it was like to be in a cult and there is a distinguished expert on cults in Massachusetts named Steve Hassan, who's a doctor or psychiatrist who was in a cult who was in the Moonies, I don't know if you can, can you say that? Is that politically correct? Who was in the Unification Church but he got out and has done a lot about trying to disabuse people and he actually worked with Ginni Thomas, I think he appeared on some panels with her and so on. But of course, she's in another cult today. There's just no doubt about it.
- I see a couple of hands, I see one here and then I see one there.
- You guys go to the mic.
- Yeah, in fact, maybe you can also, if you want to question, just line up behind the mic, so we can, you wanna just line up behind.
- Hi. So I think one thing we see is that there's no dearth of like, nut jobs in Congress, but one thing that I was reading about yesterday is that there's three candidates who were on Capitol grounds on January 6th who were not representatives at the time who stand a reasonably good shot at being elected to Congress. And I wonder how, you know, you see perhaps in the next Congress how that would play out, having, you know-
- Well, first of all, that's an interesting question. Section three of the 14th Amendment, which was pushed by the radical Republicans after the Civil War, says that if you have sworn an oath to uphold and defend the Constitution and you violate the oath by engaging in insurrection or rebellion, you can never hold federal or state office again. Now, you're talking about people who were candidates who were not members at that point, but there were certainly members and obviously Donald Trump had sworn an oath to uphold the constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic. So we're not finished with that yet, at least if I've got anything to say about it and I've introduced legislation with my colleague, Debbie Wasserman Schultz, to set up a judicial process for that actually to be considered. You know, as for people who were not in Congress, who were there, who were running for office now, for example, the GOP candidate for governor in my state, Dan Cox, who I beat for Congress back in 2016, he was there and they brought buses of people, Mastriano who's running for governor in Pennsylvania, he was there, they brought buses of people. I mean, a bunch of them were there. You know, I mean, I suppose insurrection is to have First Amendment rights too. I mean, they can go and they can run for office and they can say their thing. I would hope that people would consider it antithetical to the spirit of the Constitution to be electing pro quo, pro-insurrection candidates. But I'll tell you, it's an interesting problem under the Second Amendment because after January 6th, I started to notice a lot of my Republican colleagues were saying, well, of course under the Second Amendment you've got the right to overthrow the government. Like, what? You got the right to overthrow the government? Well, yeah, the purpose of the Second Amendment is to allow the people who there are called the militia to overthrow a tyrant. So you just have to read the Constitution to see what nonsense that is. I mean, Article I, Section Eight, Clause 15 says, Congress has the power to call forth the militias of the states in order to suppress insurrections, in order to do three things. One, enforce the law, two, suppress insurrections and three, repel invasions, right? The Republican Guarantee clause says, Congress shall guarantee to the people of the states, a Republican form of government and assist them in putting down domestic violence, right? In six different places, the Constitution is clearly anti-insurrection. Then they go to the Second Amendment and they say, well, the Second Amendment says that the people have a right to keep in bear arms. Well it says, yeah, a well-regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the people have a right to keep in bear arms. A well-regulated militia means regulated by the government, not by the Proud Boys and the Oath Keepers and the Aryan Nations, and that's very clear from Supreme Court, precedent from the beginning. So please spread the word, no, the Second Amendment does not give you the right to overthrow the government. And we've had more than 900 cases brought and anybody who's attempted that, you know, I don't even know if they have the courage to attempt it anymore, has been laughed out of court. There's not a single court ruling saying, oh, they were just involved in a violent insurrection, therefore they have a constitutional defense to beating up police officers or interfering with the federal proceeding. No, and for the same reason, by the way, you know, they say, well, you can't limit, for example, military style assault weapons because the people need to be armed as strong as the government, and that's just absurd. No, you don't have a right to nuclear weapons in your backyard to protect yourself against the government. Now, their answer to all of it is the Declaration of Independence, which of course says, you know, when in the course of human events, if a government turns tyrannical, we the people have the right to overthrow the government. But it would be absurd and ridiculous to say we're overthrowing the authority of the government by the authority of the government. If you wanna overthrow a government, you invoke natural law and natural rights or your human right to do it, but you don't cite, I mean, we didn't cite the Magna Carta, we didn't cite the British Constitution to overthrow the crown. We cited natural law, we made an appeal to the, you know, the decent respect of humankind for our rights, and we did it. You can't have it both ways. You wanna overthrow the U.S. government, you think it's a tyranny because the majority won an election. You're on your own time, you're on your own dime. You beat up our officers and you don't succeed, you're going to jail, that's it.
- Yeah.
- You know?
- Oh. I kinda, I found it kind of fascinating your view on change in the country and your ability to keep this kind of an optimistic view when it comes to the direction the country is going on and I know that you gave the example of the amendments and how they all seem to uphold this theory of democracy and expand the rights of suffrage and other forms of democracy into different groups and demographics in the United States. But I was just wondering how, like, these issues that you've raised today and even some more issues that I've seen through just watching the news or being invested in the country, kind of point to the opposite where it's like, we're going backwards when it comes to change. A couple things that I wanted to point on is this idea of the reversal of the Roe v. Wade precedent with abortion and kind of what this means for states being able to have the rights to regulate what certain people can do with their bodies.
- Right.
- With the Kyle Rittenhouse kind of a decision which doesn't have to do with politics as much as it has to do with the law and the court system, but this idea that self-defense can go as far as crossing state lines with an armed weapon in order to defend yourself against violent people who you knew would've been there. And even the critical race theory and the Don't Say Gay bill that has kind of brought us back to a point where we are being more regulated and democracy is being challenged more often. I wonder how you uphold this kind of optimism about the progress of our country while still understanding that these things are going backwards. And especially 'cause the last amendment that was passed, the 27th Amendment was passed May 7th, 1992, my birthday before I was born. And we haven't had a new like, constitutional amendment and it's become harder for the two bodies of government to work together
- Yeah.
- To even form such a like amendment. So how do you carry this optimism for the progress of the community?
- It's such an awesome question, thank you for an awesome question. And by the way, I was just at a, I was just speaking to a class at Howard, which is on my book, and they raised that exact same question you did. Like, you know, should we look at the overall sweep of American history or should we look at these, you know, particular attacks on us. When I went through the different amendments way too quickly, I wasn't, I didn't mean to imply that any of that was easy. I mean, people died. Obviously there was a Civil War before we got the 14th and 15th Amendments. You know, the Civil Rights Act of '64 and the Voting Rights Act were paid for in the blood and sweat and tears and sacrifice of, you know, Bob Moses and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Schwerner, Chaney and Goodman, and the people that went down South with a vision of a strong democracy against what was an a apartheid state, basically what they were up against. You gotta check out Bob Moses's book called "Radical Principles," "Good Radical Equations," "Radical Equations" about, you know, his experience there. So yeah, it is an absolute struggle. I didn't mean to imply some like, whiggish paradigm that inevitably there will be progress. There's nothing inevitable about it at all. It's gotta come through the struggle of the people and it's not the amendments that created the change, it's the movements that gave us the amendment that created the change as well. And sometimes you don't get the amendment, but you get the change. I mean, we had a huge movement for the Equal Rights Amendment, which ended up not succeeding. We didn't, you know, you need two thirds in the House, two thirds in the Senate, three quarters of the states and we didn't end up getting three quarters of the states, but it just radically transformed the jurisprudence on the Supreme Court and the interpretation of the meaning of equal production and transformed what was taking place in the states. A lot of states adopted Equal Rights Amendments. So it's the struggle, it's the movement that ultimately is gonna make a difference and you can have the amendments, then you can lose the progress and that's what happened with the 14th Amendment. I mean, we got the Plessy v. Ferguson decision in 1896 after equal production was added to the Constitution but they said, well, of course, equal production's gonna be interpreted through the reasonable customs and usages and traditions of the people, and of course, you know, there's a apartheid in the Southern states, that's the tradition that will be incorporated into our understanding and they legalized apartheid in America in 1896, and that lasted for 60 years before the Civil Rights Movement changed at all. So no, forgive me if I made it seem like it's easy, it's not easy. It's gonna depend on everybody in this room to win every one of the struggles you're talking about on Don't Say Gay and on what's happening to the Supreme Court. But remember this, and I'll say one more thing about the Supreme Court, but remember this, all of those things are reactions against the progress that's been made. I mean, they're saying Don't Say Gay because people are now acknowledging the existence of gay people, which is a huge historical transformation, right. They're saying Don't Say Gay because we got marriage equality through struggles in the states and through. But let me say this about the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court's another example of an anti-democratic institution, like, a choke point against the democratic freedom that we all see and want and feel in our bones, right. The Supreme Court has been absolutely gerrymandered and fixed. They kept my constituent Merrick Garland, who is Chief Judge of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals, they kept him from even getting a hearing when President Obama nominated him in February of 2016. They said 11 months is too short a period before a presidential election. We wanna let the people decide in the next election who should be the president nominating justices. Of course, the people had decided that Barack Obama would be the president for his four-year term. But they said, no, we're not even gonna allow a hearing for Merrick Garland. Okay, then Ruth Bader Ginsburg dies in 2020, eight weeks before the election. They overnight nominate Mrs. Waterford from the Handmaid's Tale, what's her name?
- Amy Coney Barrett.
- Amy Coney Barrett, okay. Amy Coney Barrett, and they ram it through. Voting had already started in a lot of states, right? They'd already begun the election in a lot of states, and so they completely dropped that rule. Okay, so, I mean, I don't want to take all day on it, but the Supreme Court today is an illegitimately composed institution rendering illegitimate decisions, and we're gonna deal with that.
- Yeah.
- And we have to deal with it as a matter of democracy.
- You know, I think there are a lot of students who have another class starting at one. So for those of you who don't have, maybe we'll just give some people opportunity to leave who have a class starting at one, then we'll take one more question.
- All right, good.
- One more.
- Thank you so much. Hi.
- Well, now this is like a one-on-one conversation.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah, I didn't realize so many people had-
- Well, thank you for being here, Congressman. Can I ask my question or should I wait?
- Yeah, go ahead.
- All right. So I'm currently taking a class here with professor who was here, and it's called The Death of American Democracy and we're talking a lot about different ways-
- It's called the Death of American Democracy?
- Yeah, it's very pessimistic, but-
- Oh geez.
- But, but there's, there's-
- You guys need to get out more, man.
- Well, okay, so. So obviously there's a lot of attacks on American democracy at once, a lot of attacks from the American right, as we talked about. But there's also, if less attacks, more sort of an abandonment of certain liberal philosophies from the left, particularly free speech and we see that a lot on this campus, on a lot of college campuses where it's really hard to talk about issues that actually matter and we have these democratic creeds that we try to foster within the class and talking about how American democracy should foster these creeds. Our first one is empathy before criticism and that is very important in the days of, you know, we are unwilling to even hear out people's opinions because we're worried it will harm us personally. So I was wondering a couple things. Number one, what do you think are the important democratic creeds that we should learn to foster this American democracy that's ever expanding? And number two, what are other ways we as college students can bolster American democracy on the college campus and in our lives around the country?
- Great question.
- That's awesome, that's great. Well, I don't know, I mean, I think a lot about, you know, Jefferson and what he put in the Declaration. He was obviously a very complicated figure and somebody who should not be canceled, although he was, you know, anchored in the system of slavery. But he wrote the words that all men are created equal and so I think that, you know, that might be the original organizing principle of a democratic ethos, right? And you gotta ask what that means and really question it. First of all, I mean, it took us a long time to get to say when we really mean all men and women are created equal but then, you know, people are obviously not born equal in terms of physical and natural endowments and people are not born equal in terms of wealth and power. People are born into different families and different communities and different places. And so like, in what sense are people born equal? And I think that part of the democratic spirit is the idea that we're all born equal in the sense that we have the opportunity to do good equally or do evil equally. You know, I know a good story about that, that my dad told me when Jimmy Hoffa was brought before the Senate Subcommittee on Racketeering, when they were investigating the mafia's infiltration of the Teamsters Union and everything and when he got up to speak, Bobby Kennedy said to Hoffa, you know, Mr. Hoffa that as, you know, President of the National Brother of Teamsters and Secretary General of the Mid-Atlantic Teamsters Pension Fund, a man of your great power and responsibility is capable of doing both very great good and very great evil and Hoffa like, leaned in his microphone and said, I intend to live up to both of my responsibilities. But anyway, the Declaration thing, I think that to talk about morality and what impact we're actually having on the world. I mean, it's a very stressful time for young people today with, I mean, not just COVID-19, which is a little bit past us, hopefully, but I mean with the polarization and with the overhang of climate change, which is making people question like, should we even have kids? Is that an ethical thing to do? There's a lot going on there and I think that, you know, moral philosophy, which was at least when I was in college, like, nobody even really taught it or like, it was just considered a backboard. I mean, that should be at the center of the curriculum, like, how to do moral and ethical decision making, and that's all about how you treat other people. So I think that's great that you guys are doing that.
- Well, thank you.
- Yeah.
- Thank you. So we're gonna have to, sorry about your questions, but again, if you want to come to the event this afternoon, 2:30 to 3:30 at Fayerweather 115. And thanks again for coming out all, and thank you so much for being with us.
- Thank you guys, thank you. Really terrific.