WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, Congressman Jamie Raskin (MD-08) released the following statement after voting to table H.Res. 537:
“The Constitution makes clear that only Congress has the power to declare war. Trump’s unauthorized military action, the details and results of which he refuses to come clean about, is one more entry in the growing inventory of his egregious violations of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The Constitution is not a minor inconvenience to be ignored at whim but the operating system for our government and the binding covenant of the American people.
“Impeachment is a critical means of political and constitutional self-defense that the people have available to use against a lawless president who acts like a king and commits high crimes and misdemeanors against the people. I have been through two impeachment drives against Donald Trump and was the lead House manager in his second Senate impeachment trial on charges of inciting insurrection against our Constitution and government culminating in the violent January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol. The trial ended in a 57-43 vote to convict, the most sweeping bipartisan margin in our history, but still 10 votes short of the constitutional threshold for conviction. There has still been no American president impeached, tried, convicted and removed from office, and I in fact led the House Oversight Democrats in the 118th Congress in defeating the ludicrous GOP drive to impeach President Biden for imaginary and unarticulated offenses.
“Impeachment in our constitutional system requires sustained public organizing and education, comprehensive and exacting scrutiny of the relevant facts and law, and overwhelming political unity and strategic focus by the forces of democracy and the rule of law in Congress.
“Together with my fellow Democrats, I am determined to defend every day the Constitution and Bill of Rights—and all the programmatic achievements of democracy like Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security—until we end Trump’s reign of lawlessness and injustice. I will not pretend this can happen overnight with Trump and his MAGA allies in charge of the White House, the Senate and the House, but I will continue to work with all of my colleagues across the land, at the federal, state and local levels, to use any and every constitutional means at our disposal to restore constitutional government and defend democratic freedom in America. We are all in this together—the fight of our lives—and we will work together for safe passage through this onslaught against the Constitution and the rule of law.”
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