VIDEO: Rep. Jamie Raskin on Standing in “Titanic Opposition” to Authoritarianism

Below is a lightly edited transcript of this special address at our second annual Wallace Symposium, which brings movements together to fight fascism and envision a more equitable future.

Congressman Jamie Raskin: It’s a great honor, and it’s a privilege and a pleasure to be with everybody. I was scheduled to be there this afternoon — I will still come this afternoon, if it’s possible, but right now, it looks like we’re going to be in votes through the afternoon, so I didn’t want to completely miss the event. So thank you for giving me a few minutes [via video] to just share some thoughts about the fight for democracy, and we are indeed in the fight of our lives today. 

You know, sometimes when we talk about defending democracy, I think it leaves the false impression that democracy is a set of static practices and institutions, and that’s all we’re defending. I think that that’s part of it, but of course, people at IPS know that democracy is always a project unfolding. It’s always a rough draft. 

And so when we say we’re defending democracy, we’re defending the struggle for democracy, and everything that democracy entails for us. You look at the front page of The Post a few minutes ago, the White House is pushing to obtain voter data and access to voter machines across the country at the same time that the Texas Legislature is going to be reconvening on Monday to more extremely gerrymander the congressional districts in the state, to be followed probably by Ohio and Florida in that same effort. 

So the right wing campaign to strangulate the voting power of the American majority continues. So when we talk about defending and expanding democracy, we’re talking about a constitutional amendment, guaranteeing the right to vote so we’re not constantly playing catch up against all of these voter suppression and voter repression strategies and all of the gimmicks and schemes that they cook up in order to steal elections away from the democratic majority. 

We’re also talking about expanding democracy in other ways. One of the critical mechanisms for the expansion of strong democracy in America has been through statehood admissions. There have been 37 statehood admissions in our history, and we need to get back on the statehood path for millions of disenfranchised people. 

I’m not talking about Canada and I’m not talking about Greenland and Panama. I’m not talking about any other independent nation carving those up as Donald Trump is fantasizing. I’m talking about the people of Washington, D.C. I’m talking about the people of Puerto Rico. 

In Washington, we’ve got 713,000 tax-paying, draftable citizens who live under the thumb of Congress. And of course, Donald Trump is continuing to talk about imposing unilateral police state control, essentially, over the District of Columbia, which is not dear to his heart since people voted I think 90 percent against him in Washington, DC. But D.C. deserves the right to be a state, and it has petitioned for statehood. It was my honor in the, I think it was the 116th and 117th congresses, to be the floor leader for D.C. statehood in the House, and it’s passed twice on the House side, which is a big historic breakthrough. It’s not been taken up in the Senate, but that’s something we can do. 

When we kicked off that debate, I said I wanted to thank the residents of Washington who have a bona fide, actual voting rights grievance, a real political grievance against America. But they didn’t come down to the Capitol and beat the daylights out of our police officers and hospitalize and wound and injure 140 of them, permanently disfiguring and disabling some of them. They’ve done it the right way, they have asked for admission as a state. 

We’ve [also] got three and a half million U.S. citizens who were completely frozen out of the political system in Puerto Rico. We’ve gotta admit them, and then we’ve gotta strengthen political democracy, economic democracy all over the country, so that people have participatory voice in all of our institutions. 

And so, when he wrote Democracy in America, Tocqueville came over and he said, “I observed that democracy and voting rights in your country are either shrinking and shriveling away, or they’re growing and they’re expanding.” We’ve got to get democracy back on the growth track in America. So that means fending off all of these moves towards fascist subversion of our institutions and voter disqualification and disenfranchisement, and then we’ve got to get the movement of democracy back in motion again. 

And so we’ve got to win back the Congress and the White House and turn this thing around and make sure that we can put our government on the side of the people and make it an instrument again for social progress and strong democracy and freedom, here and all over the world. 

So anyway, I hope I do get to see you guys later, but I’m just getting this little plug. In the event that I don’t, I salute all of the young people there, all of the people there for fighting during this time of just titanic opposition between the forces of freedom and democracy and the forces of authoritarianism oppression. 

And I yield back to you, Tope, and thank you for having me.