During a town hall on Wednesday, Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) reacted to President Trump ignoring federal court orders.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00All right, this is a question I think we all have as we're watching this play out as Trump
00:10now has defied the Supreme Court, and we don't know what the next step is going to be.
00:17And so I'm going to ask this to Senator Bennett, since he's the lawyer here.
00:22Judiciary is a critical check on the presidential power.
00:25What we do to ensure the administration actually appears to judicial ruling, and this is from Michael Haines.
00:31If you could raise your hand, Michael.
00:33All right, thank you.
00:34I mean, I find it unimaginable that we find ourselves, as you do, in a place where we have a president
00:48who's openly defying judicial decrees.
00:51Nobody has ever seen an American president do this before, and we're in totally uncharted territory.
01:01I think that it has been important for the courts to repeatedly strike down Trump's actions,
01:08which they have done.
01:10You know, even, yeah, it's pretty great.
01:13It's pretty amazing.
01:14And even today, Judge Osberg was continuing to do it for his courtroom as chief judge of the district court in D.C.
01:26And I celebrated, and this might be hard for some people here, but I celebrated it when the chief justice of the United States
01:35told the president that you're not allowed to call for the impeachment of a district court judge like Jeff Osberg is
01:42because you disagree with the opinion that that judge rendered.
01:54But it is, you know, the people, come back to my friend over here, the people that wrote the Constitution would be the least surprised by Donald Trump of anybody.
02:10They had a very dim view of humanity, as you might know, and they had their model of the fall of the Roman Republic.
02:20That's what they were thinking about when they wrote these checks and balances, when they created three branches and all this other stuff.
02:27They were thinking about somebody just like Trump, literally just like Trump.
02:32A billionaire turned his armies on Rome and marched up home and destroyed Rome, destroyed the Roman Republic.
02:39And these guys were so deeply worried about that that they wrote this web of institutions that are now under enormous pressure because of Trump.
02:49And I guess it's my hope that those of us that are participating, and some of them, are able to push back from the Congress, for example,
03:00that the judges can push back from the courts, that what's left of a free press in America can push back against Donald Trump
03:11and these, you know, social media leaders that are devastating journalism in the United States.
03:18And that we, the people, can rise up the way we are and show up at, you know, the Republican town halls and say,
03:25by the way, don't cut Medicaid.
03:27And don't do it just to cut taxes for the richest people in America.
03:31So I think it's not one thing, it's all of these things in this complicated democratic system that is now under assault.
03:41And we've got to push back from every single angle.
03:45And I think we all need to understand that with this president, we will be in uncharted territory.
03:51He already has disregarded John Booth, Grubo, Venezuela situation.
03:56And I'm sure he's going to do it on lots of other things as well.
04:00We just need to make sure that we're all still there when we get to the end.