Anderson Cooper 360 Degrees: Interview with Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD)

Interview

Well, it's ridiculous, of course. I mean, you've got people who voted not to impeach Donald Trump for inciting a violent insurrection against the Union either because they don't think that's a crime or because they don't think the evidence was there, even though the evidence was overwhelming.

We did have 10 Republicans who joined us in the House and seven Republicans who voted to convict in the Senate. But in any event, you've got all these Republicans who could not bring themselves to vote to impeach Donald Trump, who tried to overthrow a presidential election and attack our constitutional order, now moving to impeach Joe Biden, for reasons unstated.

Now, so I think that that's absurd. I applaud Congressman Buck from Colorado, who was a district attorney who was the chief of the criminal division of the US Attorney's Office in Colorado. He is someone who understands the criminal law and understands the constitutional law and he knows that the whole thing is absurd.

There is no evidence of treason, bribery, or high crimes and misdemeanors. There's no evidence of any crime at all by Joe Biden. And so all of this is clearly being driven by Donald Trump, who wants to establish this counterfeit moral equivalency between the two of them, just so he can say he is running against another impeached president.

So it's really silly and they are extracting this as their price for going along, at least this week, with not trying to shut the government down.

But you know, I think a lot of the inside critics of what's happening in the Republican Conference will tell you that they really do intend to try to shut the government down before the end of September.

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Well, it is a combination of that escalating political pressure within the GOP, but also enough of them coming forward and saying that they will not play ball on the budget this week, unless he launches the impeachment inquiry.

Now, they're not satisfied with what McCarthy has done on either front on the impeachment side. All he's really said is that the three committees -- Ways and Means, Judiciary, and the committee I serve on now as the ranking Democrat, Oversight, will continue to do what they've been doing.

He is not forming a new impeachment committee and the Oversight Committee is supposed to be leading, but each one is going to do their own work. And so I think that very quickly, the Matt Gaetz-Marjorie Taylor Greene caucus is going to grow frustrated with that, that's not going to be enough for them.

And they're also, you know, in this rule or ruin mindset, really hoping to get the Republicans to drive the economy into a ditch and to shut the government down again, which of course they did a few years ago.

So we'll see whether McCarthy will actually be able to subdue, you know, the tumultuousness going on within the Republican Conference.

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Well, you know, I'm not sure that you can always rationalize the behavior of the MAGA caucus. They are constantly pushing for the most extremist and fanatical actions.

There is no program really that unifies the Republican Conference ever since Donald Trump took everything over. I mean, they literally had no platform for four years, and their real platform consists of whatever Donald Trump tells them to do.

So I think that they do have a rule or ruin mentality, if they're not going to be in charge, they're going to try to create as much trouble as possible.

I mean, they didn't work with us on the $1.2 trillion infrastructure investment package, they did not work with us on the Inflation Reduction Act, and inflation is down from nine percent to three percent and we had this massive investment in climate action as well as lowering everybody's prescription drug prices. We didn't get a single Republican vote for any of that. They are not interested in making progress unless they're in control, and of course, when they're in control, progress is just massive tax cuts to the wealthiest people in the country and cheating women out of their constitutional rights.

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You know, I'm not closely watching the White House. What I'm doing is engaged in the work of the Oversight Committee.

So for seven months, we have watched the Republicans on the Oversight Committee and Chairman Comer, get all of the witnesses they want, all of the documents they want. More than 12,000 pages of documents, and there is no evidence of any criminality or wrongdoing by Joe Biden.

There are 91 criminal charges against Donald Trump right now, 13 criminal charges against Congressman Santos who was just on the show a few moments ago, they have nothing to say about that. There are no charges against Joe Biden, and they want to impeach the guy. That's obviously coming from Donald Trump.

It's sort of like January 6. January 6 would not have happened had Donald Trump not got all of the right-wing groups to change their permits from the National Park Service from January 20th where they were just going to have an inaugural protest to January 6th.

And it's the same thing here. If Donald Trump were not demanding impeachment, does anybody think this would be going on?

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Thanks for having me.

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