The following is a lightly edited transcript of the September 11 episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch this interview here.
Perry Bacon: Let me start by asking your reaction just generally to Charlie Kirk’s shooting death yesterday.
Representative Jamie Raskin: Well, it’s a nightmare. Political violence is absolutely inexcusable and unjustifiable. And we denounce it and it’s dangerous. And now’s the time. We’ve got to return to the principles of nonviolence.
That’s the point of a social contract is that we agree to have political discussion and disagreement nonviolently. We don’t kill our fellow citizens. My heart goes out to Charlie Kirk’s family and we continue to do whatever we can to re-emphasize the central importance of nonviolence in all of our political engagements.
And we hope that every political leader and every office holder will do that.
Bacon: OK, let me move to what we were planning to talk about today, which is this government funding debate with the government funding expiring September 30. A lot of talk about Democrats should have some conditions be for further votes, particularly in the Senate where some Democratic votes will probably be needed. What is your view on that? Are there some conditions that should be attached to Democratic votes? And if so, you have any? Is that healthcare? What is that for you?
Raskin: Well, first of all, we don’t even know whether we’re going to support it or not support it. And remember, Republicans control the House. They control the Senate. They control the White House. And effectively, they control the Supreme Court. So if they want to pass a budget, they can pass a budget without us. Now if they can’t do it on their own, and we know that they would prefer to do it on their own—but if they can’t do it on their own, then they come to us and then we engage in the old-fashioned art of legislative compromise.
We are going to defend the health care of the people. We are going to demand that 17 million people who are about to be thrown off of Medicaid get health care coverage. We are going to demand that Social Security be protected. We’re going to demand that all of the laws be enforced. That’s to start off with.
We would like to make that deal with them and we should be able to make that deal. That’s precisely the deal we made. But there’s an additional problem now, which is they have shown a willingness to engage in a bipartisan budget compromise then come back later and use their paper-thin majorities in the House and the Senate in control of the White House to rescind, that is to revoke, the budget items they don’t like.
In other words, the ones that we negotiate for, that we demand, that are our part of the compromise—they’re willing to unilaterally revoke later. Well, we’re not suckers. We’re not going to do that. And so we want ironclad language in there that they will not go back on the budget agreement and use one party control to rescind the things that we’ve negotiated for.
Bacon: So I heard three things there. I heard health care which means Obamacare, subsidies particularly. Is that what you’re saying are just generally health care?
Raskin: Across the board. Every part of the health care of the people, we are fighting to guarantee. That’s an absolute minimum for us.
Bacon: Well, I guess some talk about rolling back the Medicaid cuts within the “big, beautiful bill.” Should that be a condition as well? Rolling back? Are you going to insist upon that? I know you would prefer it to change, but you can insist upon that.
Raskin: Yeah, well that’s my starting position anyway. And to be clear, I’m the ranking member on the judiciary committee. I’m not on the budget committee, so it’s going to be up to them and our leadership and our caucus to do it. But my feeling is that our people want to fight. Our caucus wants to fight. Our leadership wants to fight. We want to fight to protect the health care of the people. All of us. And the big dreadful bill was the largest revocation of health care in American history, so we can’t have that.
Bacon: But something in the bill that says the rescissions have to stop—that they can’t come back later and cut things. That’s a condition. You, Congressman Raskin, that should be in your view. That should be part of any deal.
Raskin: It needs to be that. Again, I don’t know that we’ve ever had a rescission—a rescission prohibition provision—so we’d have to see exactly how it’s written.
But yes, we need to button it down as clearly as possible that the whole compromise cannot be undone by unilateral one party action. And so as much as possible to make it completely irrevocable once the budget agreement has gone into effect.
Bacon: I don’t love this language, but if those conditions are not met, the Democrats should not vote.
It wouldn’t be the Democrats shutting it down. It would be the Democrats should not vote for an agreement that does not include these conditions is what you’re saying, right?
Raskin: Remember, they control the government. It’s extremely narrow, so it’s up to them whether the governments can be open or closed.
They control every branch and every house of government. So if they can’t govern on their own, what it means is they need to enter into bipartisan governance, right? And obviously when they can do things over our objections, they do. And in fact, Trump now just ignores the Republicans in Congress. He just goes ahead and does it unilaterally.
We have to reassert congressional preeminence over the budget. We have the power of the purse.
Bacon: So did some agreement also state that Trump cannot unilaterally ignore the budget because I think he’s done that a little bit himself as well. Would that be something you would push for as well?
Raskin: Yes, indeed.
That’s why I am saying we want to enforce the law across the board. Judge Breyer in San Francisco just struck down the militarization of law enforcement, the deployment of American soldiers against American communities. He said that’s what the Posse Comitatus Act is all about.
That totally violates American federal statutory law and American tradition. We don’t use the army against the people in that way. That’s what we have local police forces for. So I would love to see that as part of it.
Bacon: Some kind of restriction on the National Guard usage, in other words, should be in the bills, which we’re getting at.
Raskin: Again, the enforcement of the law—the law’s being violated in so many different ways. We’ve got more than 200 preliminary injunctions and temporary restraining orders across the board. And so we want to make sure that nothing—that none of the money that we’re appropriating—is used for purposes that are at odds with the U.S. Constitution and federal law.
Another example would be when all of the immigration raids began, they were invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, which clearly doesn’t apply. That’s a wartime statute, not a peace time statute. That got struck down by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, an extremely conservative court.
They struck that down. So yeah, we wouldn’t want any money going into that. So we want to make sure money is only used for lawful purposes and not in places where the courts have struck down federal action because they keep going against the rulings of the courts.
Bacon: Let me shift focus to the Epstein debate. I guess in both houses of Congress now, you’ve had a vote to potentially get these files released. The Republicans have, in both cases, voted against that. What’s the next thing Democrats can do? What other levers do you have to get these files released?
Raskin: We just had a new member of the House of Representatives sworn in yesterday, Mr. Walkinshaw from Virginia. So now we are only two votes away. No, one vote. Yeah. One. We’re only one member away now. We needed two members to join the petition for the for discharge. A discharge petition is when the leadership is bottling up a bill and not letting it out of committee. If you can get a majority of the members to, say, dislodge that, discharge that—well, we’ve got every Democrat, we’ve got four Republicans: Mr. Massie, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert my friend, Nancy Mace. So those four Republicans have joined. We only need one more Republican now to join us to discharge the legislation to get it out and put it on the floor.
So we’re very close. Yesterday in the Judiciary Committee there were a number of bills dealing with immigration and trafficking, and I introduced an amendment that none of them go into effect until the complete Epstein file is released—which, of course, Republicans had been demanding. Trump had been demanding. But after they delegated the task to a thousand FBI agents to pore over all the Epstein files and redact offending passages, they came back and said, Oh, nothing to see here. We don’t want that anymore. Sweep the whole thing under the rug. Well, we’re not going to take that. We don’t want the dribs and drabs they’re sending us. And I’m grateful to our Democratic colleagues on the House Oversight Committee who pressed to get the material we’ve seen recently—including the birthday note, which Donald Trump claimed didn’t exist. He even sued The Wall Street Journal for $10 billion because they reported on it, and that claim was debunked by the disclosure. But in any event, we don’t want these dribs and drabs coming out. We just want the whole thing. We don’t want the stuff that they want us to see, we want the stuff they don’t want us to see.
Bacon: What’s the next mechanism to push them?
Raskin: To get the final voter, to get the next couple of votes. We are looking for that final Republican who’s willing to step up. Most of the Republicans are telling their constituents that they supported having the Oversight Committee look into it. But I don’t know how much confidence people have in Chairman Comer’s willingness to ask the hard questions, the tough questions, and subpoena all the documents. And we don’t need to be this thing. We just need to get the entire Epstein file—which, of course, was the original bipartisan demand—and we should stick with that.
Bacon: Last question. I guess you, Congressman Crockett, a few others are on this. So the Republicans have this new “we’re going to reinvestigate January 6” committee that that you’re going to be on now.
Talk about what you can do there and how you can prevent this from being an overturning of history and a whitewashing of history, which is I assume what they want it to be.
Raskin: Well, we won’t let that happen. We’re there to refute and debunk all of the lies and conspiracy theories.
But look, the truly bipartisan select committee on January 6 worked on this for more than a year and a half. We interviewed more than a thousand witnesses. We looked at more than a million documents and we released a report which has just been completely unrefuted and untouched by the right wing, despite the fact that they have engaged in every effort to try to oppose it. They wanted to say it was really antifa, it was really FBI agents—anything but what actually happened, which is Donald Trump incited a mob that came down and engaged in massive violence against our police officers. We had more than 140 officers that were wounded, injured, hospitalized, disfigured, forced to retire from the force because they’re disabled.
That whole mob insurrection was surrounding an internal coup, an attempt to get the Vice President of the United States Mike Pence to reject electoral college votes, which is not part of the Constitution, which is not part of any federal law to return electoral college votes. So he would either end up declaring Trump won the election magically, or more likely kick the whole thing into the House of Representatives for a so-called contingent election under the Twelfth Amendment. And there we would’ve been voting not on the basis of one member, one vote but one state, one vote. And they knew that they controlled 27 state delegations.
We had 22. Pennsylvania was tied with nine members on each side. So Pennsylvania’s vote would’ve just been written off. It would’ve been 27–22 unless, of course, Liz Cheney, as the at large member of Wyoming, had decided to stick with the actual vote. But even then, they would’ve won 26–23. Then they were prepared to have Donald Trump ride in and declare his victory. And at that point, after hours of rampaging violence against the police and chants to hang Mike Pence—hang Mike Pence—he would’ve called in the National Guard to put down the chaos he’d incited against us. And maybe he would’ve even.… Who knows what measures he would’ve imposed at that point. But that was where they were headed. That was the claim.
He lost that election by more than 7 million votes. It was 306–232 in Electoral College. It wasn’t even close. Sixty federal and state courts had rejected every claim of electoral fraud and corruption. So we had an attempted political coup surrounded by insurrectionary violence led by Proud Boys and Oath Keepers and other groups that were identified.
And then all this mob violence. So we’re going to tell the truth about what happened. We don’t see why they’re doing this again, other than Donald Trump is trying to engage in an Orwellian whitewash and revisionist history of what took place.
Bacon: Congressman, thanks for joining me. I know you have a lot of fans, and I’m one of them. New Hampshire is close to Maryland—just a note in case you weren’t sure about that. So, thanks for joining us. It was great to have you. I’m glad you’re playing such a prominent role in politics, and I hope you continue doing that. Thank you—you’re a real patriot.
Raskin: Thank you for your great journalism. Perry Bacon, it’s wonderful to meet you. And I send my best to all your wonderful fans out there. Thank you.
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