YouSaid · the spoken record
Jamie Raskin
On the record 2025–2026
congress
This is everything the corpus holds for Jamie Raskin. It is not everything they have said on the record.
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“Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, I will answer my good friend, the chairman of the subcommittee, about the remarks he just made. He is correct that the President, of course, like Members of Congress, must also interpret and enforce the Constitution. In fact, that is the core part of the President's job, to take care that the laws are faithfully executed, says Article II, not distorted or rewritten, but to take care that the laws are faithfully executed. That doesn't negate the fact that under Marbury v. Madison, it is emphatically the province and the duty of the Judicial Department to say what the law is in the event of an actual case or controversy. The gentleman invoked George Washington.”
House of Representatives8 April 2025Source ↗
“Mr. Speaker, the Supreme Court has already rejected at least two of the actions that Donald Trump has taken since he got in. One was firing the executive director of the Office of Special Counsel. He was reinstated. The other was reinstating a $2.1 billion aid grant that was essentially impounded and diverted by the administration. Mr. Speaker, I yield 1 minute to the very distinguished gentleman from Virginia (Mr. Subramanyam).”
House of Representatives8 April 2025Source ↗
“If we are talking about deciding the constitutionality of a law, obviously it is the judge under Marbury v. Madison. I know that the distinguished gentleman from the Committee on the Judiciary knows that the fact that Donald Trump beat Kamala Harris by 2 million votes is neither here, nor there. Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by 7 million votes, and they still went to court pretty much on a weekly basis to try to get Joe Biden's legislation and his programs struck down. The majority believed in judicial review then. We should understand that it is very convenient for Republicans to say, all of a sudden, that my colleagues on the other side of the aisle don't believe in judicial review just because they have the Presidency. Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentlewoman from North Carolina (Ms. Ross).”
House of Representatives8 April 2025Source ↗
“Mr. Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Mr. Speaker, just to answer a couple of things raised by the gentleman from Ohio (Mr. Jordan), my friend. First of all, that is not what the Supreme Court said. The Supreme Court simply said that this was not a case that should be going through the Administrative Procedure Act under the Immigration and Nationality Act. It should be done through a habeas corpus in the district of confinement, in Texas. Mr. Speaker, in fact, the Supreme Court affirmed that there must be due process for people who were illegally taken out of this country and sent to El Salvador. Secondly, the gentleman gives us a false choice when he says: Who gets to decide? Is it the person who puts his name on the ballot and goes out and campaigns, or is it an unelected Federal district judge? Decide what?”
House of Representatives8 April 2025Source ↗
“Mr. Speaker, I thank the gentleman for his astute observations there and say that Judge Kacsmaryk was reversed several times by higher courts. We never came out and said, therefore, let's ban nationwide injunctions. We did say we should reform judge shopping and forum shopping. That is the real problem. Yet, it is not a problem if there is a nationwide crisis created by illegal action by an executive that a judge has the authority to counter that with an injunction and then it gets appealed up to the Supreme Court. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.”
House of Representatives8 April 2025Source ↗
“There will be a lawsuit on this, and what our colleagues are saying is that if there is a bipartisan lawsuit that goes to court which stops these tariffs that are crippling businesses and farmers and wiping out people's retirements across the country, and if they succeed in one district, say, in Minnesota or Wisconsin or New York, you have to go to every one of 94 different districts in the country to get the benefit of that. That is what they want to do. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.”
House of Representatives8 April 2025Source ↗
“Mr. Speaker, the link to the entire document can be found here: https://harvardlawreview.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/920- 1009__Online.pdf . Mr. Speaker, I yield 2 minutes to the distinguished gentleman from Georgia (Mr. Johnson), the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Courts, Intellectual Property, Artificial Intelligence, and the Internet.”
House of Representatives8 April 2025Source ↗
“Our government is not a monarchy, and our federal judges are not Westminster chancellors; in no small part, the one has followed from the other. The Article proceeds in six Parts. Part I maps how the current discourse concerning universal injunctions has gerrymandered the analysis of judicial power and has thereby cast undue doubt on the propriety of this remedy. Part II explores how the Supreme Court in the 1890s endorsed an expansive view of the powers of federal courts to control the rights of nonparties through injunctive decrees. Part III describes injunctions against enforcement of federal statutes issued by the Court itself in the 1910s and 1920s and examines their implications for the Article III analysis.”
House of Representatives8 April 2025Source ↗
“May courts decide disputes only for the parties before them, or may they declare the law for nonparties, too? This Article's contribution to that evergreen debate is to show how, in the period from 1890 to 1943, the law- declaration model animated and guided the actions of federal courts as they issued decrees on myriad questions of public law. Expanding the frame of our inquiry even by this much reveals that the injunction reaching beyond the plaintiffs-- and the law-declaration model of the judicial power that this remedy implies--is not some late-blooming efflorescence of post-Warren Court judicial hubris. Rather, it is a tool that developed in tandem with, and in support of, the regime of routinized judicial review of state and federal official action that we continue to live under today.”
House of Representatives8 April 2025Source ↗
“They have pressed Congress to institute such a rule by statute--and indeed, the 115th Congress lately considered doing just that, holding hearings on whether it should forbid what the bill at issue styled as ``orders purporting to restrain enforcement against non-parties'' in cases not certified as Rule 23 class actions. Justice Thomas, as noted, has suggested that Article III may forbid injunctions that reach beyond the plaintiffs. We must be clear about one thing: it would be a sharp departure from precedent and practice to treat Article III as requiring the equitable remedial powers of federal courts to be cabined in that manner. Article III confers a singular power upon all federal courts to decide ``Cases[ ] in . . .”
House of Representatives8 April 2025Source ↗
“Barnette, shortly after Perkins, the Court affirmed an injunction that reached beyond both the plaintiffs' children and the alleged plaintiff class to shield ``any other children having religious scruples'' from a state law requiring students to salute the American flag. This history has important implications for how we should understand Article III. Today, critics of the universal injunction contend that Article III courts should adhere--or, as they sometimes frame it, revert--to the rule that injunctions must be solely ``plaintiff-protective.'' They have urged the Advisory Committee on Federal Rules to create such a rule by amending the Federal Rules of Civil Procedures.”
House of Representatives8 April 2025Source ↗
“Lukens Steel Co., the Court held that the plaintiffs lacked standing and were thus not entitled to seek any kind of relief, the steel companies' suit, the Court held, ``contains no semblance of these elements which go to make up a litigable controversy as our law knows the concept.'' Crucially, Perkins left intact the propriety of injunctions reaching beyond the plaintiffs as remedies in cases brought by plaintiffs with standing, indeed, Perkins is bookended by decisions in which the Court continued to approve that practice. In Hague v. CIO, less than a year before Perkins, the Court affirmed an injunction that protected those who acted in sympathy with the plaintiffs from enforcement of a city law; in West Virginia State Board of Education v.”
House of Representatives8 April 2025Source ↗
“A growing vein of scholarship concerning such injunctions has also developed. This Article demonstrates that the universal injunction is a tool with a more venerable lineage than heretofore recognized. Surveying cases involving both state and federal law and drawing on decisions by courts at all three levels of the federal judicial hierarchy, this Article shows that Article III courts have issued injunctions that extend beyond just the plaintiff for well over a century. Building on this lost history, this Article argues that the Article III objection to the universal injunction should be retired and that legislative efforts to outright strip the federal courts of the substantive power to grant such injunctions should halt. Let us begin with the history.”
House of Representatives8 April 2025Source ↗
“In December 2018, the Solicitor General's Office called for the Court to ``arrest'' this ``disturbing but accelerating trend,'' which it cast as a ``rapidly expanding threat to the respect that each coordinate Branch of our Nation's government owes the others.'' In guidelines to Department of Justice civil litigators, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions referred to such injunctions as ``abuses of judicial power,'' a ``threat[ ]'' to ``the rule of law,'' a ``danger to our constitutional order,'' and a ``kind of judicial activism [that] did not happen a single time in our first 175 years as a nation.'' Several states--including states that earlier sought and won such injunctions--now contend that ``universal injunctions contradict the rest of Anglo-American jurisprudence.'' The Trump White House, in its characteristically measured tones, has hinted that the practice is perhaps not beyond criticism.”
House of Representatives8 April 2025Source ↗
“If Article III allows such injunctions as to state laws, it a fortiori allows such injunctions as to federal laws. Mapping these and other pieces of the lost history of the universal injunction, this Article demonstrates that the Article III objection to the universal injunction should be retired and that the unfolding efforts to outright strip the federal courts of the tool of the universal injunction--whether by statutory fiat or by a judicial redefinition of Article III--should halt. But I would speak to the consciences of honorable men, and ask, how they can venture . . . to recommend changes, which may cut deep into the quick of remedial justice . . . .”
House of Representatives8 April 2025Source ↗
“Mr. Speaker, I include in the Record ``The Lost History of the `Universal' Injunction,'' a law review article by Mila Sohoni refuting what was just stated by the gentleman. The universal injunction, the nationwide injunction, goes back at least to 1913 and has been used repeatedly over the last century. [From the Harvard Law Review] The Lost History of the ``Universal'' Injunction (Mila Sohoni) The issuance of injunctions that reach beyond just the plaintiffs has recently become the subject of a mounting wave of censorious commentary, including by members of Congress, a Supreme Court Justice, the Solicitor General, the Attorney General, and the President. Critics of these ``universal'' injunctions have claimed that such injunctions are a recent invention and that they exceed the power conferred by Article III to decide ``Cases[ ] in . . .”
House of Representatives8 April 2025Source ↗
“Even worse, this campaign of vilification has spread to their families, including attacks on a Federal judge's daughter who had her photo and place of work posted on a social media site by Elon Musk to his 290 million followers. These threats followed an actual bomb threat targeting the sister of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett. It is a dangerous situation. Now our colleagues want to pass the No Rogue Rulings Act which would effectively ban Federal district courts from providing nationwide relief against unlawful actions by the administration. Litigants could request injunctive relief only with respect themselves.”
House of Representatives8 April 2025Source ↗
“As Chief Justice Roberts said a few weeks ago, the proper response in our democracy to a judicial decision that you disagree with is to appeal the ruling, not impeach the judge. Donald Trump has gotten some relief in some of his cases already. The system is working. We don't need to turn the whole world upside down to distract from the economic calamities they have brought upon us. All this would be fun and games except the rhetorical assault by Trump and Musk and our colleagues against the judiciary has turned into something far more sinister in some quarters: death threats, bomb threats, and online intimidation and harassment of judges. These judges are currently targets of an onslaught of social media taunts and attacks that call for their exile to GTMO or label them a national security threat or traitors.”
House of Representatives8 April 2025Source ↗
“Biden issued 162 in all 4 years. Trump can issue as many as he wants, but he has got to make them constitutional because if they are not, they are going to get struck down. When Trump denounces the judges as radical left judges and lunatics who have gone rogue like Judge Boasberg, he is just advertising his complete ignorance of the Federal bench. Judge Boasberg is the chief judge of the U.S. District Court, first nominated to the bench by President George W. Bush, who was Justice Kavanaugh's roommate at Yale and a pillar of the conservative bar. We have impeached only 15 judges in U.S. history, always for serious misconduct like taking bribes, embezzlement, corruption, and habitual drunkenness on the bench. It was never because of a doctrinal disagreement and never because of a judge's legal ruling.”
House of Representatives8 April 2025Source ↗
“Joe Biden beat Donald Trump by over 7 million votes, and that didn't stop them from suing to stop numerous Biden policies they thought were unlawful. Sometimes they won, and sometimes they lost. It is the same now. Nearly 160 cases have been brought against Trump and Musk's actions. Trump has won some, and he has lost some. However, our colleagues protest that Trump is different because the courts have issued relief in at least 57 different cases, a record number of cases in American history, at record speed. That is true, but if it seems like an incredible number of cases to lose in less than 100 days, recall that Trump is engaged in a record number of illegal actions at a breathtaking velocity never seen before in U.S. history. As of today, he has already issued 111 executive orders in less than 100 days.”
House of Representatives8 April 2025Source ↗
“The judges have explained in painstaking detail what is unlawful about Trump's executive orders and actions. Trump has offered no substantive critique of their legal reasoning, but he and Musk still want the judges impeached. They say they should be removed from office simply for striking down the President's illegal policies, which is odd given that Trump and his party demanded for 4 years that Federal judges strike down President Biden's policies like student loan forgiveness or immigration policies or EPA action on climate change. They seem to embrace Marbury v. Madison and judicial review of Democratic Presidential actions but not of Republican actions. They say that is because Trump just won an election. He beat Kamala Harris by 2 million votes. Guess what, Madam Speaker.”
House of Representatives8 April 2025Source ↗
“No, today they want to talk about the real emergency, which is the power of the United States district courts to issue universal injunctions rather than just injunctions that apply to the specific parties in the case. It seems like a rather boutique and esoteric issue to raise in the middle of an economic catastrophe that they just foisted upon America, but there is a method to the madness. You see, Madam Speaker, Federal judges have issued at least 68 court orders that block or pause the administration's lawlessness to prevent irreparable harm in the country from his unconstitutional actions. The judges deciding here were appointed by five different Presidents, both Democratic Presidents and Republican Presidents, in 11 different district courts across seven circuits.”
House of Representatives8 April 2025Source ↗
“That is perhaps the greatest achievement of the Trump administration so far. What an enchanting and clever basis upon which to crash the economy of the United States of America. Despite the fact that Congress, not the President, has the power to regulate international commerce and legislate tariffs, our GOP colleagues don't even want to have one hearing on the breathtaking economic folly and wreckage of this fling into the abyss of trade war with the world, much less do they want to do anything to reverse this policy nightmare for tens of millions of businesspeople, farmers, workers, retirees, and consumers being throttled by this historic, self-inflicted wound.”
House of Representatives8 April 2025Source ↗
“When asked why Putin uniquely escapes the wrath of Trump's global trade war, we are told it is because Trump doesn't want to interfere with the negotiations taking place between Russia and Ukraine for a cease-fire, an explanation that might have somewhat more force if Trump had not made sure that the tariffs do apply to Ukraine as they do. The basis for this most imbecilic and destructive trade war in the history of the world is the profound economic research and policy writings of one Ron Vara, a completely fictional economist conjured up by Trump adviser Peter Navarro, a real person whom Elon Musk just called a moron and dumb as a sack of bricks. Navarro's last name, delightfully, is an anagram for Ron Vara. Madam Speaker, you can try this yourself at home. Navarro turns into Ron Vara. Navarro figured that out himself.”
House of Representatives8 April 2025Source ↗
“He destroyed more than $10 trillion in American wealth in 1 single week, and then he went golfing and bragged to America about winning the tournament at his own golf course. Madam Speaker, that is like bragging about being endorsed by your own campaign manager. With so much winning, the country can hardly stand how much winning Trump is doing for himself, Elon Musk, and his billionaire Cabinet. Perhaps he could have yelled fore on the fareway so tens of millions of Americans could have taken our retirement savings out of the stock market before he hit us in the head with a golf ball. Trump's ruinous tariffs have crushed our relationships with democratic allies and loyal trade partners like Canada, Mexico, the U.K., Germany, and France while delicately carving out an exception for Trump's friends in the home office back in Russia.”
House of Representatives8 April 2025Source ↗
“Madam Speaker, I yield myself such time as I may consume. Madam Speaker, I rise in opposition to H.R. 1526. I heard the majority was bringing legislation forward to clean up a major policy crisis taking place within the first 100 days of the Trump administration, and that sounded pretty good to me because we are drowning in crises. The problem is that this bill does not address any of the real major policy crises of the first 100 days that Trump has caused for America. They are wasting our time with this bill by misdiagnosing and mislabeling the judicial response to these crises as a crisis itself. The whole country is reeling right now from the economic disaster Trump has plunged us into.”
House of Representatives8 April 2025Source ↗
“Let's stop clutching our pearls. There has been lots of heckling over on that side of the aisle. I saw the gentlewoman from Georgia heckle the last President and have a whole heckling section there. We didn't try to censure them or kick them out of Congress or anything. We actually not only say we believe in free speech but we believe in free speech. We will stand up for people's right to speak. Now, I don't believe in the kind of heckling where you drown somebody out and you make it impossible for them to speak, but the gentleman was trying to start a conversation as opposed to just being spoken to all night.”
House of Representatives5 March 2025Source ↗
“I would prefer to stand by the tradition of free speech and even the tradition of heckling. There is a fine American art of heckling. If you read the Lincoln-Douglas debates, I recommend the Harold Holzer version of it because the newspapers carried all of the hecklers' comments, too. People would get up and heckle, and Lincoln would interact with them and Douglas would interact with them.”
House of Representatives5 March 2025Source ↗
“Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays. The yeas and nays were ordered.”
House of Representatives13 February 2025Source ↗
“The truth is that these Republican politicians are terrified to overturn these regulations in broad daylight. They know America supports them. They should show some courage. Stand up for your anti-working class, anti-middle class, and plutocratic principles. Go ahead and vote to destroy the $5 bank overdraft rule, but do it openly, do it clearly, and do it one by one. Take each one on. We will stay here with you all day. We will even work a 9-to-5 day, something we haven't seen around here in a long time. We will work 8 hours or 12 hours if you want to get into the details of it. Let's do our jobs for real. I dare you, all you single-subject zealots out there, to oppose this embarrassing and humiliating Midnight Rules Relief Act. Mr. Speaker, I reserve the balance of my time.”
House of Representatives12 February 2025Source ↗
“Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays. The yeas and nays were ordered.”
House of Representatives22 January 2025Source ↗
“Mr. Speaker, may I inquire as to the time remaining.”
House of Representatives22 January 2025Source ↗
“Mr. Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays. The yeas and nays were ordered.”
House of Representatives16 January 2025Source ↗
“Mr. Speaker, I am prepared to close. Mr. Speaker, I ask unanimous consent to include in the Record the text of this amendment immediately prior to the vote on the motion to recommit.”
House of Representatives16 January 2025Source ↗
“Madam Speaker, on that I demand the yeas and nays. The yeas and nays were ordered.”
House of Representatives7 January 2025Source ↗
“Madam Speaker, may I inquire as to how much time is remaining?”
House of Representatives7 January 2025Source ↗
“I trust that my friends agree that those who commit horrific, violent crimes like these must be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. This bill fails to take any meaningful action to improve our broken immigration system and to prevent crimes like this from occurring again, whether the undocumented aliens entered under a Democratic administration, as they have, or a Republican administration, as they have. We are asked to vote on a bill that fails to address any of the real issues at stake, and we are foreclosed from offering any amendments to improve this sloppy and political product. Mr. Speaker, I urge all my colleagues to oppose this legislation, and I reserve the balance of my time.”
House of Representatives7 January 2025Source ↗