Democrats Prepare to Pursue Oversight as Republicans Face Political Repercussions

Republicans are finally getting the karma they deserve. Democratic Congress member Jamie Raskin, who chairs the judiciary committee, is unleashing on these mega Republicans. Let me show you what went down as Raskin, utterly humiliated, mega Republican Dan Crenshaw on live TV. It seems like Crenshaw, after being just an utter loser, is trying to audition for something, as this Trump regime collapsed, and Congress member Raskin puts him in his place, and basically gives a warning shot to all the mega Republicans out there that things are going to look very different. I want to share this with you. Then I want to pivot to what's going on right now in the Texas House of Representatives where Democrats have taken control. I'll talk to you about what the new speaker there said, State Representative San Fronia Thompson. I mean, this was pretty incredible. State Representative Thompson, she was sworn in in the mid-70s. She's 87 years old. I will show you what that was like in a moment. But first, let me show you Congressman Raskin just putting Dan Crenshaw in his fricking place here. Play this clip. Yeah. Play Abram Lincoln, created your party, Donald Trump, destroyed your party, and you went down with it. Can I ask you about that, Congressman? I'm doing great. You seem a little flustered. I got 82% of the vote. I'm doing great today. I got a new grand show. Congratulations on that, which I will do at the end. I just, I can't believe there's still going down the road with Donald Trump. It's not about Donald Trump. It's completely vague to play the role like this. We've got to get back on the track towards democracy and freedom in your government serving the common good. This isn't, we can talk about Trump and his and his factor in the election. Of course, of course, it's a factor. He's unpopular policies, but he knows they're unpopular. And I don't think Trump really cares about him. He said he doesn't care about the American people. I don't think it doesn't care about him. He doesn't care about him. He doesn't care about the mid terms. He doesn't even care about the, he can let me ask you and everybody something. Let me ask you and everybody something. There's still going down the road, Donald Trump. There's already long-term policy be dictated by what we think will be good election outcomes. I hope you answer. That's what democracy is. No, I hope you answer no. I hope you can be. No, hold on a second. Do good policy, Jamie. Now, if you let me wish that were true. You let me speak for a moment. Okay. The Constitution says that only Congress can declare war in America. Your president with your support took us into an illegal, unconstitutional war. You said he knew it was unpopular. Well, how proud he must be. He knew it was unpopular because he never put it to the test of a vote of the American people's representatives. The framers of the Constitution did not want a king who would plunge his nation into wars of conceit, avarice, impetuous, imperial ambition, and compliance with the Republican everything. You're against actions on Iran. We can debate the policy. No, wait a minute. I'm talking about the policy. I'm talking about the Constitution. I thought that was something you were interested in. Well, there's the war power. It's an unconstitutional war. They were divided by the war powers actors. No, they did not. They did not. No, they claim it's five different wars and you know it. Stop lying to people. Have you been to a war? Tell us all about it. Go ahead. Tell us about it in a war. People like me are on the ground. Yes. Okay. It's not the case right now. And so you believe we're not in a war? Is that your point? Yes, that's right. We're not in a war. Okay. Well, everything else you can understand is they want a war. They've called it a war. Numerous times. And our people are dying there. You understand that, right? You've had very few casualties that are the result of air strike coming into America rejected exactly what he's saying. And here's the thing. They're not let's say that. You know what? Elections of consequences. Something you said to us for the last two years. We repudiate and reject your illegal unconstitutional war. We reject and repudiate your illegal tariffs. Their ruin is for our economy. And we reject all of the corruption. Your party has no plan and no program for America. Okay. You got your new impeachment speech. You got two years coming up where you can try to come up with a program for America. But we reject the war. We reject the tariffs. We reject the corruption. We want the government to serve the American people. And we're going to start by repealing a lot of the terrible stuff. So let me show you what was going on in Texas where state representative Thompson. Again, who was sworn in first in the Texas State House in the 1970s. She's 87 years old. She has enough votes to now become the speaker of the House. Now that Democrats have control of the House in Texas. Watch her statement holding that gavel. Pretty incredible here. Play this clip. You know that I came in 1973. I have worked with the majority and I have worked with the minority. I have been chairman of committees and I have been vice chairman of committees. And ladies and gentlemen, let me tell you something. When we work on issues, you don't look for the guy who's working with a Republican or Democrat. Can we give a solution that's going to benefit the people of this state of Texas? The gavel doesn't belong to me. The gavel does not belong to the Republicans nor the Democrats. The gavel belongs to the people of this state of Texas. Back to Democratic Congress member Raskin for a moment. Here's what he had to say about Congress. Look, we have the power to declare war and we are going to make sure that Trump and Vance are held accountable. We control the money, not them. Watch another warning shot over here. Play this clip. All legislative power is vested in a Congress of the United States of America. And then page after page after page of all the powers of Congress. We've got the power to declare war. Not Donald Trump and JD Vance and their signal chat group. We've got the power to appropriate money. If you're a president and you don't like what we're doing, we'll veto it and we'll try to override it. But if you sign it and it's the law, it's the law. And Appropriations Act has all the force of any other law. You can't impound it. You can't redirect it. You can't steal it. You can't reach it. If we say you spend money for USAID or the Department of Education or the Department of State, you spend that money. That is not optional. And we've got the power to regulate federal buildings. Article 1, section 8, clause 17. Article 4, section 3, clause 2. That is us. If the president can bulldoze the East Wing and the White House, he can bulldoze the West Wing and the White House. He can burn the whole thing down like the British did in the War of 1812. It's not his house. That's our house. That belongs to the people of the United States. And Congress governs it. So, you know, and then you get all the way through all that. And you get to Article 1, section 8, clause 18. And all other powers, necessary and proper to the execution of the four-going powers. Then you get to Article 2. What's the president's job? Sometimes people say, well, Commander-in-Chief, right? But not of the country, not of the government, not even of the armed forces. Commander-in-Chief, if you're a textualist of the army and the navy, and the militias in times of actual service. Yeah. Okay, what is the real job of the president? Very simple. To take care that the laws are faithfully executed. Yeah. To take care. All we say to Donald Trump is, do your job. Do your job. He did seem to have a problem with faithfully executed. Yes. He's been faithlessly executing others. More from Democratic Congress. Member Jamie Raskin on the Supreme Court. Let's play it. So, let's just say that's not perfect safety there. And, you know, even with that wretched, totally whimsical, fictional decision of the Supreme Court, conferring presidential immunity. You know, and that is such an outrageous decision. I mean, these people call themselves textualists. Like, where do you see in the text of the Constitution that the president's got immunity for felony crimes? He actually commits in office under the core auspices of the presidency. Where is that? When the framers wanted to write immunity into the Constitution, they did. Like, the speech and debate clause, remembers of Congress, to save us from the kinds of fraudulent prosecutions and investigations that the president is engaged in right now. The framers had a lot more faith in the representatives of the many than they did in what one, you know, one mad king might do drunk on power, right? So, and there's no mention of any of that at the Constitutional Convention or the ratifying conventions or any of that stuff. So, I guess I would just say, even though within that terribly flawed decision, it doesn't apply in a completely comprehensive way. If the president steps out of whatever they see as his proper public role, and they wanted to make sure that talking to the attorney general was totally off-limits to prosecution, but there were other things that he might do that they would be willing to see as not under the correct auspices of the presidency, and therefore outside that outer perimeter. And if anybody's going to test that, it's going to be Donald Trump. This was a very, very powerful moment where he said, "I don't even understand why people act like talking about affordability and accountability are different things." He goes, "They're the same thing, and we're going to make sure that we hold these mega-republic and traitors accountable, powerful moment. Let's play this clip." So, the first meaningless false dichotomy comes from the media, which is, "Are you going to do accountability or are you going to do affordability?" As if they were in any way different from each other. If you look at the history of tyranny within our species, like think about the French monarchy, and when Maria. Antoinette says let them eat cake, right? Now, is that a problem for the people of accountability or is it a problem of affordability? It's the exact same thing. It's government in the interest of a tiny group of people so nobody can afford to buy their baguettes. Nobody can afford to buy their bread. And so when the monarchist is let them eat cake, that is a statement of what the priorities are of a tiny privileged few who serve oligarchs and nobles and so on, and not the vast majority of the American people. I mean, the American Revolution began with the Boston Tea Party because the East India Corporation, which was this chartered bloated corporation from the crown, had decided that they should get tax advantages for the importation of tea that the colonists could not get. Now, is that a problem of corruption and authoritarianism and tyranny, or is it a problem of affordability in the cost of living? And it's the same with us, right? So what's the main dramatic price increase people have been complaining about? Well, it's gasoline, which is up a buck 50, a gallon since before the Iran War started, right? In some places it's still 450, 460 right now. Diesel is up to, I think, 670. A lot of people, you know, in Maine or New York or Minnesota, Wisconsin, they heat their homes with diesel oil. They're being charged $6.70 a gallon. All right, now, is that a problem of affordability or accountability, affordability or corruption? Well, let's see. The person who was supposed to be negotiating with Iran was centrally involved with the Donald Trump team in destroying the JCPO, Jared Kushner, was very involved in taking down the nuclear agreement that kept Iran for at least more than a decade from investing in any nuclear development. And then Trump came in and wanted, above all, to destroy that. Well, who else had an agenda of trying to destroy that so then the lack of a nuclear agreement could be used as a pretext for war? Well, Iran's principal enemies in the region, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Israel, the all of those countries targeted Iran. They wanted that nuclear agreement to go away and it was working great. There were all kinds of investigative enforcement mechanisms that were taking place and it was working fine. And they wanted to tear it down. Then the lack of that agreement became the justification for this illegal, unconstitutional war never declared by Congress that has cost the American people more than, I think it's $55 or $60 billion at this point cost dozens of American lives. And I don't even know how many thousands now of Iranians, but certainly more than 1,000 Iranians as a girls boarding school was destroyed in the first day of the war. And so, well, the fact that everybody's paying so much for gasoline and diesel, is that a problem of affordability? Or is that a problem of accountability and corruption? I mean, it's a meaningless question. So the other one-- War from Congress member Raskin over here where he says, and we're not going to hesitate to go after private corporations, either. Let's play it. We will not hesitate to go after the private corporations that are collaborating in all of the lawlessness with Donald Trump. And we've done it before, and we will absolutely do it again. The law firms, you mentioned, we know that there were many heroic law firms that have stood up against all of the law breaking and then the attempt to shake them down for the time of their partners and their young associates. And yet, there are major law firms in America, including Paul Weiss that have capitulated to these coercive tactics by Donald Trump, and have basically surrendered and made all kinds of outrageous concessions. We've sent a number of letters to those law firms, and they have been not forthcoming up until now. But when we have the power of subpoena and we have the power to conduct oversight, we believe a lot of these law firms are going to be coming forward and telling the truth. Otherwise, they are law firms that have no respect for the rule of law. And we're going to make sure that they comply with the congressional subpoena. It is the exact same legal force as a judicial subpoena does. Subpoena means under the power or under the penalty of law. He then talks about the Supreme Court, let's play it. Look, the Supreme Court for the vast majority American history has been a profoundly conservative and mostly reactionary institution. And we forget about that because the Supreme Court still somewhat has a little bit of a glow from the war in court and Brown versus Board and Roe versus Wade. But it didn't last long before they started reversing everything and undercutting what they had done before. And that's what we saw in the Berger Court and the Renquist Court. And now the Roberts Court, because this Supreme Court has intervened to stop the counting of ballots in Bush versus Gore in 2000, it has demolished the Voting Rights Act, the greatest statute of our history, which actually made it possible for millions and millions of people to participate effectively in the process. And it has sided with Trump in almost every way in terms of trying to turn the clock back. So the Supreme Court alas has become in many ways an obstacle to democracy. We need to get democracy moving again. [APPLAUSE] And then here's what he says about minus touch network host, Katie Fang. Very powerful moment over here. Let's play it. So you on the hill, you're going to have a big gaville. It's a peanut power soon. Thank you, sir. Thank you, Scott. And we know that the press is not the enemy of the people. The press is the people's best friend. So you keep holding us to account. And thanks for what you're doing in Katie Fang. Especially thanks to you for fighting hard on the Epstein files to see the truth and justice for both done. Thank you so much. Thank you, Congressman Raskin. There you have it, everybody. Let me know what you think. Hit subscribe. Let's get to 7 million subscribers. Appreciate y'all so much. It's finally here, WTF America. The book I wrote with my brothers is out now. It's about how we got into this hell and how we get out. 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