Federal Appeals Court Rejects Trump Absolute Immunity Claim; Interview With Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD);

Interview

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"Well, the Republicans are just not good at counting their votes. And on our side, we got conditioned to a great vote counter in Nancy Pelosi, and I think that Hakeem Jeffries and Katherine Clark, who is in charge of that has been doing a great job of knowing where everybody is and who's going to be there, and I imagine they made provisions for Al Green to get to the floor despite his condition. But the Republicans suffered three significant defections, and one was

Ken Buck, who has been increasingly constitutionalist in his thinking and much more willing to take a walk on the GOP now that he has announced his departure from Congress.

McClintock and then I think Congressman Gallagher abandoned them, and they just didn't have the votes. I saw Marjorie Taylor Greene on the way out this evening and she was vowing to bring it back up again in committee. It's been recommitted, and she said, they're not done with it yet.

But you know, it's a laughingstock impeachment. It's just mad hat excursion for them to go in and try to impeach a Cabinet secretary, at the very moment when that Cabinet secretary is working with the Senate to produce the compromise on immigration in the border that the Republicans claim to want.

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Yes, they are just not taking yes for an answer. I mean, you had Lankford out there, saying he could not for the love of God understand why the Republicans would walk away from the best deal that they could get from their perspective. McConnell was for it. There were dozens of Republicans speaking for it. "The Wall Street Journal" editorial was for it, but remember, Donald Trump needs something to run on.

Abortion is gone as America has been proven to be a pro-choice country, thanks to the people of Kansas and Ohio, and all over the country, anytime they put up one of their theocratic anti-abortion bills, it's gone down, and the next one to go down will be in Florida, or I think the Florida voters will write a right to choice into the Constitution. But in any event, that's gone for them.

And so immigration is all they have left, and Donald Trump thinks he knows how to demagogue that. And so he has basically thrown himself in the doorway to say, under no circumstances will his followers let an immigration go through no matter how pleasing it is to the members and so, there's also Vladimir Putin hanging around in the background eager to sink the $60 billion in aid and strategic assistance to the people of Ukraine fighting off Putin's filthy imperialist invasion.

And so you've got Putin in his ear. Trump knows he wants to run on immigration. And at this point, the GOP is the MAGA party. It's Trump's party, and they just want to blow everything up. It really is a party of chaos and insurrection.

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I mean, he doesn't want a solution, he wants a scapegoat and he thinks that he knows how to run against Mexicans and run against immigrants and rapists other than himself, of course and that's the kind of campaign he wants to run. It really is in the gutter and the shocking thing is how much he has dragged the whole Republican Party down and we're talking about Abraham Lincoln's party.

It was an anti-slavery, pro-union, pro-freedom, pro-reason party, and it's been turned into this authoritarian cult of personality obsessed with conspiracy theory and disinformation and it is playing out every day in Congress and it is an embarrassment.

I mean, everybody is calling them the do-nothing Congress, but that's on the good days. When they try and do something like today, it is impeaching a Cabinet official for doing his job.

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You bet."

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