During a House Judiciary Committee hearing prior to the congressional recess, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) spoke about Republicans pushing 'pseudo-revolutionary rhetoric' in defense of the Second Amendment.
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NewsTranscript
00:00Thank you and I yield back.
00:02The gentlelady yields. The chair now recognizes the ranking member for the entire committee, Mr. Raskin, for his opening statement.
00:09Thank you kindly, Mr. Chairman.
00:11Just on that interesting point you raised at the beginning, I think we stand by our math.
00:17There are more than 50,000 gun dealer licensees in America, more than 6,000 pawnbroker licensees,
00:25and more than 20,000 manufacturer licensees who each have the right to directly sell from their unique physical locations.
00:32And that does add up to more than the various fast food outlets and so on that we identified.
00:39But we'll submit for the record the exact arithmetic.
00:42I'm glad that you at least implicitly seem to agree that if true, this is a shocking statistic
00:50that there are that many gun violence dealers in the country.
00:54In 2022, shocking levels of gun violence caused Congress to come together after decades of inaction
01:01to pass the first major piece of gun safety legislation in 28 years.
01:06Ever since President Biden signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act into law,
01:11and with the efforts of the ATF, we've made substantial gains in reversing the gun violence epidemic.
01:20We ended 2024 with a 25% drop in nationwide homicides compared to 2022.
01:29And of course, firearms are involved in more than 80% of murders in the country.
01:33According to the Office of Gun Violence Prevention's one-year progress report in September of last year,
01:39more than 600 defendants had been charged under our new gun trafficking and straw purchasing laws,
01:44and 900 firearm transfers to people under the age of 21 were prevented by enhanced background checks.
01:51The key point is that this law and other Biden administration regulations saved thousands of lives,
01:58contributing to 3,500 fewer murders between 2023 and 2024 without ever once infringing on the Second Amendment.
02:08And we know this because the Supreme Court never invalidated any part of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act
02:16or any other Biden administration gun safety rule as a violation of the Second Amendment.
02:22On the contrary, they've all been deemed to be constitutional.
02:26Yet our colleagues continue to insist that common-sense gun safety laws of this type violate the Second Amendment.
02:33But the Second Amendment doesn't protect the right of access to a firearm without a violent criminal background check
02:39or the right to purchase machine guns or military-style assault weapons.
02:43The Supreme Court, including in the D.C. v. Heller decision, has repeatedly stated that
02:51reasonable regulations of firearms to protect public safety are consistent with the Second Amendment.
02:59But our colleagues want to preempt state and local law and force Americans to accept more dangerous weapons in their community
03:07all under the guise of protecting the Second Amendment.
03:11I challenge my colleagues to explain how any of the Biden administration reforms actually violate the Second Amendment
03:17because no court ever said they did.
03:19The problem is that some of our colleagues have completely deformed and misstated what the Second Amendment stands for.
03:28Their now-infamous insurrectionist theory says that the Second Amendment gives you the right to overthrow the government.
03:36Our former colleague Matt Gaetz said the Second Amendment, quote,
03:39is about maintaining within the citizenry the ability to maintain an armed rebellion against the government if that becomes necessary.
03:47This purported right to overthrow the government means that the people must enjoy access to munitions
03:53equivalent to that of the arsenal possessed by the government.
03:57As my friend Representative Chip Roy says, the Second Amendment was, quote,
04:01designed purposefully to empower the people to resist the force of tyranny used against them.
04:08And my friend Lauren Boebert says that the Second Amendment, quote,
04:11has nothing to do with hunting unless you're talking about hunting tyrants, maybe.
04:17Despite all of this pseudo-revolutionary rhetoric about how the Constitution provides a right of civil insurrection,
04:24the actual Constitution, in a half-dozen different places, treats insurrection and rebellion not as protected rights
04:32but as serious and dangerous offenses against our government and against our people.
04:37Article I gives Congress the power to call forth the militia to execute the laws of the Union,
04:44suppress insurrections, and repel invasions.
04:48The Republican Guarantee Clause in Article IV tells the U.S. to guarantee a Republican form of government to the states
04:55and protect them, quote, against domestic violence.
04:59These provisions followed Shays' Rebellion, an armed uprising in Massachusetts in the 1780s,
05:05which the founders strongly condemned and which influenced the writing of the Constitution.
05:11The Constitution thoroughly rejects the right-wing fantasy that random bands of disgruntled citizens
05:17can claim the powers of a militia to commit violent acts against the police.
05:24Article I, Section 8, Clause 16 reserves, quote, to the states, respectively,
05:30the appointment of the officers and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress.
05:39This intergovernmental cooperation is how we come to have what the Second Amendment calls for in its first clause,
05:46a well-regulated militia.
05:48This means well-regulated by the government, as the Supreme Court has repeatedly said.
05:53The Proud Boys and Oath Keepers are not a militia.
05:57A private militia is a contradiction in terms.
06:00In 1886, the Supreme Court upheld a state law criminalizing private paramilitary groups,
06:07and every state and union today bans private militias.
06:11A militia is not the reserve power of the people to attack the government.
06:16On the contrary, it is the instrument by which the federal and state governments
06:20can suppress violent insurrections against the government.
06:25Now, today, when I point out these problems with their theory to my distinguished colleagues,
06:36they generally fall back on two responses.
06:38One is they will quote Patrick Henry, who said, give me liberty or give me death,
06:43which is great, because that was a great bumper sticker in the 18th century.
06:47But Patrick Henry was an anti-federalist who opposed the ratification of the Constitution.
06:53So that's like quoting speeches by Jefferson Davis to settle the meaning of the 14th Amendment.
06:59They also invoke more plausibly the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence
07:04for the idea that after a long train of abuses and usurpations,
07:09an aggrieved people have the right to alter or abolish the bonds holding them to a tyrannical government.
07:15Now, that's true, of course, but it's irrelevant, because the revolutionaries
07:19undoubtedly asserted their right, not as a right under the British Constitution or the Magna Carta,
07:26but as a matter of natural right to overthrow a tyrannical government.
07:30That's very different from saying the Constitution itself guarantees the right to have the means to overthrow the government.
07:38If you think that the 2020 presidential election, for example, which Joe Biden won by more than 7 million votes,
07:45306 to 232, is an exercise of tyranny akin to King George's tyranny against the colonists,
07:52by all means, you can come down and beat up our police officers and try to overthrow the government.
07:57But if we catch you and we stop you, we will prosecute you under the full force of the law
08:02and put you in jail, at least until the next president decides to pardon the people who've done that.
08:08Look, this fraudulent constitutional philosophy of insurrectionism is exacting a brutal toll
08:16on the American people and our social contract by blockading perfectly reasonable and constitutional gun safety measures
08:24that are saving lives in America. The whole purpose of the social contract is to make ourselves safer
08:30than we would be in a lawless state of nature, which Hobbes described as a state of war.
08:35And yet the insurrectionist caucus has brought us gruesome episodes of high-tech military-style violence
08:42everywhere in America, from Walmarts to grocery stores to elementary school classrooms.
08:47It's time to reassert the real primacy of the Constitution and its real meaning.
08:52Thank you. I yield back to you, Mr. Chairman.
08:54Thank you. I didn't know you were going to make it to the yield part.
08:59Thank you, Mr. Raskin. Since you invoked me directly, I'll respond directly.