00:00Thank you, Senator Schumer. We're going to start with questions with Congressman Raskin.
00:04Thank you very much, Senator Durbin and Senator Schumer. Thanks for joining us and for your powerful leadership on behalf of the rule of law and the Constitution in New York and all over the country.
00:15Your citation of Senator Warnock reminds me of something that Ben Franklin said, where he said,
00:22I've observed that wrong is always growing more wrong until there's no bearing it anymore, but that right, however opposed, comes right at last.
00:33Warnock paraphrased Benjamin Franklin.
00:35Well, they were thinking along parallel lines.
00:39Thank you, Jamie.
00:40Thank you for joining us. I want to recognize my Democratic colleagues who've joined us today.
00:47Hank Johnson from Georgia, Ted Lue from California, Deborah Ross from North Carolina,
00:50Chuy Garcia from Illinois, Mary Gay Scanlon from Pennsylvania, and Becca Ballen from Vermont.
00:56So I just have a couple of questions for you guys.
00:59One is I want to say that when, pursuant to Senator Warnock and Ben Franklin, we get through this nightmare, and we will,
01:07and when we reclaim the trajectory of American history for democracy and freedom, and we will,
01:14all of you will be remembered by future generations for what you did to stand up for us during this time.
01:21And I don't want you to think that anybody doesn't notice, because we do notice what it is you're doing.
01:26But I want to ask you this, because in addition to the substantive defense of the rule of law and the Constitution you're engaged in,
01:32all of you are also modeling what it means to be an attorney general, because we've got an attorney general in the United States
01:38who literally thinks her job is to be the president's lawyer and to do whatever the lawyer, whatever the president wants her to do,
01:45and thinks that the Department of Justice is the law firm for the president and his political party.
01:52I mean, that's a remarkable deformation and diversion of American history.
01:57So, although it's indisputable that all of you are Democrats, I don't think you're here to represent the Democrats
02:05or the Democratic Party of your state.
02:07And I just wonder if you would say a word about what it means to you to be an attorney general
02:11and to try to act on behalf of the rule of law and not a political program.
02:17Perhaps Attorney General Rogel, if you'd start.
02:21Thank you for that question.
02:22You know, I serve as the attorney general of the state of Illinois, and in Illinois, I am independently elected from the governor,
02:34and by way of that, I serve the rule of law.
02:41I don't serve the governor.
02:42I do represent the governor.
02:44I represent the agencies within the state, but I serve the rule of law.
02:48And I take that distinction very seriously, and I think that the U.S. attorney general should operate with the same sort of –
03:00she shouldn't be loyal to the president, but she should be loyal to the rule of law.
03:08That does not mean you're not representing the government and the administration,
03:14but you have to do so within the bounds of the rule of law, and we take that very seriously.
03:18Is there any one of you who would describe your job as being the governor's lawyer?
03:24Exclusively, in any way, okay.
03:26So I don't know if anybody wanted to add anything else on this.
03:29Yes, Attorney General Campbell.
03:30I'll just add, similar in Massachusetts, elected by the people, and I'm accountable to the people
03:36in upholding the rule of law and protecting their rights and protecting their state's economy.
03:41I would just stress, and I think the NIH case, which we were all a part of, whether it's the first case
03:47or even the second iteration of that case to protect access to these critical life-saving medical research,
03:55clinical trials, this is billions of dollars that go to every state in the country.
04:00We came together not looking at, okay, how do we just protect those who are Democrats or identify as Democrats in this country?
04:08We came together recognizing the unlawful actions by this administration to cut that funding in NIH-1 quickly on a Friday night
04:16and mobilized to show up in court on Monday because we knew what was at stake.
04:20When you talk about a child having pediatric cancer or a vet dealing with PTSD, we don't look at whether or not they have a D or an R by their names.
04:28We mobilize to advance that litigation to protect the public health, not even only of those folks in our state,
04:35but to protect the public health of everyone across this country while at the same time upholding the rule of law.
04:41I think it's just a great example of some, a great example of how we do our work regardless of political affiliation or even demographic.
04:51Well, thank you for doing that.
04:52And Ellison and Plotkin, let me just twist the question a little bit.
04:55One of the things you guys are doing is defending the integrity of federal laws and programs that we've adopted.
05:02And because of the very restrictive standing rules that the court has imposed against Congress going to court to try to get our laws implemented,
05:11in a weird way, you're standing up for the laws that we've participated in passing.
05:16But that's for all of the people, because after all, it's your representatives in Congress who voted for them as well.
05:22But I wonder if you could just reflect a little bit on that role you're playing in terms of making federal law work for everybody in the country as a state attorney general.
05:32Chairman Raskin, we regard the laws that Congress passes as fundamentally the prerogative of the people who populate this country and send members to Congress.
05:52And so for an executive to usurp the role of Congress in appropriations or establishment of agencies or anything like that,
06:03we view as an outrageous overreach that simply cannot be tolerated.
06:08As I noted in my comments, the things that the president is trying to do, you probably can do if you follow the rules.
06:19But you cannot do it vis-a-vis executive order or edict or proclamation or this is how I feel this morning.
06:26The fact is, is that there are procedures that they can follow.
06:31They got to go to Congress.
06:32You want to abolish the Department of Education as horrible of an idea as I believe that is.
06:37You have to go through Congress to do that.
06:39So he's not only doing things that I think are harmful to the American people.
06:44He's doing them in a way that is harmful to our system of justice and democracy.
06:51Great.
06:52And then finally, forgive me.
06:56I was just going to note, Representative Raskin, that what you said at the start of this is the core of many of the lawsuits we filed.
07:04Article 1 gives this body the broadest powers, particularly when it comes to passing laws, spending money.
07:13And a bulk of the cases we have talked about and have brought have been the president.
07:18And we say he can't act like a king.
07:19It means he can't take actions that you have done and put into law, signed into law by a president, passed by a Congress,
07:24and decide on a whim that he wants to, say, convert a Department of Transportation highway program into an immigration enforcement program.
07:33That is not what the Constitution allows.
07:36And so our lawsuits have been about standing up in many ways for the authority of this body to do the important work that it does.
