Washington, D.C. — U.S. Senator Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) joined social media influencer and political activist Olivia Julianna for a wide-ranging discussion on President Trump’s first week in office, how Democrats can work with the new administration, and the impact of Trump’s executive orders.
Watch the full video of the interview here.
Key Excerpts:
On standing up for our rights and freedoms:
[…] Even as we try to get things done, whether it’s fires or bringing down housing costs or bringing down food or medicine costs, where we can find some common ground, we hope. Even as we do that, we need to pick our fights where the administration is doing things that are deeply damaging, destructive of our values, unlawful, unethical — and we have to be unstinting in our opposition to that. We’re going to have to do both.
And because we have to pick those fights, it means we can’t chase every crazy squirrel coming out of Trump land. To give you an example, one of his executive orders had to do with renaming the Gulf of Mexico. And others go to whether we buy Greenland and this other nonsense. We can’t spend a lot of time focused on that when there are far more serious issues, dangerous things that the administration is doing. So number one, let’s find common ground when we can find it. Number two, let’s fight back hard when our Constitution is threatened, when our rights are threatened, our freedoms are threatened, our fellow citizens are threatened, our fellow human beings are threatened. We give no ground.
On how Trump’s executive orders are dismantling our democracy:
[…] People that aren’t really familiar with or not remembering what it was like four years ago for the last inauguration or the last time we had a new president, this is not normal. And to, for example, pardon 1,500 people who attacked the Capitol, invaded the Capitol, many of whom beat police officers and gouged them and bear sprayed them — to pardon them, not only is a terrible continuing injury to those police officers that protected us that day, but also sends a message that if you engage in violence on behalf of the president, he will have your back. That you just may get a get out of jail free card.
And that is a really dangerous step we have taken as a country. We can’t allow that to become somehow normalized. But other of the president’s executive orders are plainly unconstitutional like that, that would deny people birthright citizenship. You can’t simply say, “I’m signing something in a stadium somewhere, and this is going to nullify whole sections of the Constitution.” But other things are within his power of doing, which could very well tear families apart. The whole mass deportation plan will, if it’s carried out, mean terrible heartbreak for millions of people who will be separated from their children or deported to countries that they have no recollection of. That could be just shattering for people.
Other things also deeply far-reaching — the attack on climate, the dismantling of any diversity and equity efforts in the federal government, and even more than that, essentially through various orders, trying to establish kind of a loyalty test, almost a oath you have to take to the person of the president rather than the Constitution. That seems to be the functional equivalent of what they’re trying to achieve. So, very radical. It’s a lot to take in. We’re going to have to push back vigorously against the worst aspects of these orders and this whole strategy.
On Trump testing the loyalty of his Cabinet:
[…] People who went in who were more or less normal mainstream people with experience, were thrown under the bus by the president because they were invariably asked to do things that were at odds with their moral compass or at odds with what they thought they could legally do, and he would savage them. So, it’s a dangerous proposition to go into that administration. Everybody seems to think they will be different.
During the questioning I did of Pam Bondi, his attorney general, I brought up the fact that she may think she’ll never be put in that position. So did Bill Barr. Bill Barr crossed a lot of ethical lines carrying dirty water for the president. He finally reached a line even he couldn’t cross, and he was savaged for it by Donald Trump. The question is not really whether they’ll be tested. These people are all going to be tested. It’s just how soon that test is going to come and whether they pass.
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