Washington, D.C. — In a video, U.S. Senator Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) reacted to the passage of the partisan and fatally flawed Republican continuing resolution.
View the video here. Download the video here.
Read the full transcript below:
So today was a bad day for the country. And I won’t sugarcoat it, today was also a bad day for the Democratic Party. Let me explain.
Today we took up that six-month CR, or continuing resolution, giving Donald Trump six more months to continue doing what he’s doing: tearing down our agencies, firing federal workers, cutting Medicaid, closing Social Security offices, devastating veterans, laying off veterans.
We just gave him six more months to continue down that destructive path.
We and the Congress gave up our authority, gave up our power to allow him to continue to do this because we feared something worse if we refused.
Now I made it clear, I think that was the wrong judgment. I strongly oppose this CR, but nevertheless, it passed.
Why is this a bad day for the country?
We have to step back and understand what our Founders did when they established the Constitution and our set of checks and balances.
Our founders understood that, as Madison said, “Men were no angels.” If they were angels, there would be no need for government.
So, we needed a government. But we also needed to make sure that that government divided up power so that no one could become too powerful. Understanding the nature of human nature, that the accretion of power can corrupt human nature. They split up the power between the different branches of government – between the executive, the legislative and the judiciary, and that worked well for 200 years.
Until it started to break down. Until institutions started to – on their own – give up some of their authority.
Now, the founders expected that we would jealously guard our own institutions. That ambition would be made to check ambition. So the ambition of people in the legislative branch would check the ambition of people in the executive branch. And the ambition of people in the judicial branch would be a check on both the other branches.
But that has broken down in favor of the ambition of a president of your own party. And so we have seen Republicans in the House and Senate willing to give up their authority to this president because they think this president will do their will. Or because they think that the president will carry out their agenda and won’t punish them for dissenting.
Perfect test case in this CR: Republicans giving up the power of Congress to stop these tragic terrorists that are wrecking the economy.
Why on earth would Congress give up that power?
Because they don’t want to have to vote on it themselves. Because they’re afraid that if they do vote on it and they affirm what Donald Trump is doing, they’ll be punished by their voters. So they say, we would just rather not have that power anymore. We will give it to you, Donald Trump.
That is a bad day for the United States, a bad day for the balance of power.
We are ceding our authority. We are concentrating it further in the executive. And if there was any executive that could not be trusted with any more power, it is Donald Trump.
The Supreme Court too has given up its authority by handing the president what he wanted, which was a decision giving him absolute immunity from prosecution, putting him above the rule of law.
So bad day for the United States of America.
But it’s also a bad day for the Democratic Party. We are in the minority in the House. We’re in the minority in the Senate. We don’t control the White House. We certainly don’t control the majority opinion on the Supreme Court. The only hope that we have of standing up to this president, of pushing back against the destructive actions he’s taking is if we stay together.
In the House, Democrats stayed together. We did not stay together in the Senate.
Now I understand many of my colleagues who voted the other way that I did today firmly hold the conviction that voting for it was the less of two evils. And look, we are all peering through the glass darkly. We are all trying to imagine the future, if this passes or if this fails.
But one thing is very clear, and that is without unity, without common agreement between Democrats in the House and in the Senate and amongst ourselves, we have no power to stop this president. This must not happen again.
But it will take more than Democratic unity in the Congress to stop this president from tearing up our country.
It will require much more. It will require all of us.
It will require that reporters told not to write stories by their newspaper for fear of the president’s reaction, speak publicly, risk firing or resignation. That subscribers make their views known when a newspaper gives up its editorial independence.
It will require customers to make their views known when corporations cater to the president. It will require universities to stick together when the president goes after one university, to understand that all universities are in the same boat.
It will require reporters when they are attacked for not using the president’s preferred language about absurdities like the Gulf of America.
That reporters stick together and band together, not let them be picked apart by a president with no veneration, understanding or appreciation of the First Amendment.
It will require all of us. It will require you in your personal capacity, to speak out in your workplace, in your home with your neighbors. It will require all of us to defend our First Amendment rights, our right to choose who will govern us, and place limits on the power of those who do.
It will require all of us.
92 years ago, on the 53rd day into a new chancellorship, the German parliament decided to give up its authority to the new chancellor, to allow the new chancellor to govern by decree.
Today is the 53rd day of the Trump administration.
Now we have not decided to fully give up our power to this president, but we took a tragic step in that direction today.
We must not take that step again. Thank you.
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