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Transcript: Rep. Jamie Raskin on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan,” April 26, 2026

2026-04-26T12:14:00-0400 / CBS News

Updated on: April 26, 2026 / 1:40 PM EDT / CBS News

The following is the transcript of the interview with Rep. Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, that aired on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” on April 26, 2026.

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MARGARET BRENNAN: We’re back now with Maryland Democratic Congressman Jamie Raskin. Congressman, you were there last night.

REP. JAMIE RASKIN: Yes, indeed.

MARGARET BRENNAN: One of the guests in the ballroom. Unfortunately, this is not your first encounter with political violence. For many people in that room, the president, Steve Scalise, who survived a shooting himself, Charlie Kirk’s widow was there, RFK Jr. as we mentioned, and you were at that Capitol on January the sixth, sheltering in fear for your life at that period of time. How did that influence what happened last night? What did you do?

REP. RASKIN: So I just entered the room, and I was talking to some reporters who approached me from the Boston Globe. Their table was right near the perimeter. As I was entering the ballroom. Kerry Kennedy was their guest, and we were in conversation when there were three loud booms. Heard some screams, plates, glasses, silverware hitting the ground, and then everybody was yelling, get down. Somebody kind of pushed me from the back, and we all ended up on the floor. When it was over, Kerry, who, of course, lost her father to an assassin gunman and her uncle, President Kennedy, she said, I can’t believe that school children are dealing with this all across America and don’t have the resources to process their trauma. And so that launched a conversation about gun violence and how you know, somewhere between 275 and 300 people are shot every day in our country, and we lose more than 100 of them every day. So even as this nightmare was unfolding at the White House Correspondents Dinner, dozens and dozens of people had been shot and killed in our country. And so I hope this isn’t just an inside the beltway story. I hope we talk about the conditions for school children and people all over the country who are dealing with this.

MARGARET BRENNAN: No, it’s a good point. We had- we benefited from all that security. Those children across the country don’t have a sliver of it.

REP. RASKIN: Well, that’s right. And you know, I heard President Trump talk about this demonstrating the importance of the new ballroom, and he sent out some messages about the ballroom, and that might help people who are visiting the White House, but what about people who are in shopping malls and movie theaters and high schools and elementary schools across the country? So I hope we can have a serious bipartisan national conversation about what we can do to improve public safety for everybody.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, to that point, I mean, we’re in the 10th week of a partial shutdown of Homeland Security, which, by the way, Secret Service, falls under the umbrella of Homeland Security, so do many essential workers. This has been just tangled up in this policy standoff in Congress. Do you think things change after last night?

REP. RASKIN: I certainly hope so. I mean, we, you know, of course, we had a unanimous vote out of the Senate, all the Republicans, all the Democrats, and then all the Democrats in the House vote to restore all of the funding, except for ICE. And of course, it was about ICE killing innocent people in Minneapolis, Alex Pretti and Renee Good that led to this standoff over this so I hope we can improve public safety for everybody.

MARGARET BRENNAN: But it was in the house, and Republican leadership wasn’t willing to do that. But do you think it changes now that Democrats and Republicans will say, let’s fund everything fully?

REP. RASKIN: Yeah, again, we’ve got three quarters of Congress all together on moving forward, resolving the remaining issues and getting everything funded. Fortunately, you know, there’s no interruption in any of ICE’s funding because it was so super, hyper funded originally. So that’s why it’s kind of a made up controversy, because they have the money that they need, but we still have to deal with the underlying issues that led to this in the first place.

[CROSSTALK STARTS]

MARGARET BRENNAN: It was the Democrats’ position to hold that up–

REP. RASKIN: –to hold up?

MARGARET BRENNAN: To make the argument over changes, policy wise, to ICE and CBP

REP. RASKIN: Right, after the killings in Minneapolis, yes, absolutely.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Understood, because you said it was made up–

REP. RASKIN: –The vast majority of the American people agree- well no, what’s made up is the idea that ICE somehow isn’t getting its money.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Got it.

REP. RASKIN: It’s been getting, I mean, it’s got the money for a long time because of the original, you know, the “big, beautiful, bill.”

MARGARET BRENNAN: The president. I want to make sure that I recognize what he said, because we don’t hear him speak this way very often. He said, I asked all Americans to recommit with their hearts, to resolve our difference peacefully, and he talked about being unified with members of the press.

REP. RASKIN: Yes. Well, that certainly- that’s a new message from him. That’s great. He had called the press, of course, the enemy of the people, and he’s been engaged in a lot of lawsuits against your profession.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, yes. We are going into this politically charged midterm season. There’s going to be campaigning around the country with lawmakers out there. I mean, does something change? He said, this, does something change? Does democratic language need to change as well?

REP. RASKIN: We have said all along that we need every politician in the country, every leader in the country, every citizen IN the country denouncing political violence across the board, regardless of where it’s coming from. So, you know, I find this a welcome change in rhetoric. But you know what happened last week, they brought a lawsuit against the Southern Poverty Law Center, whose whole purpose is to or is to investigate violent right wing extremism in the country, and now they’re prosecuting them for having used undercover agents, which, of course, the FBI uses and the government uses all the time.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Understood. And there is, across party lines, some political violence, way too much of it right now. And actually, Speaker Emerita Pelosi on this program said to me recently that she thought the threat or the concern about violence or threats to your family is what is hurting recruitment of people to run for office, particularly mothers, particularly women. Are you seeing that? That people are afraid to even join public life because of this?

REP. RASKIN: Sure, anybody who’s thinking about running for office undoubtedly thinks about that. Anybody who’s thinking about running for president undoubtedly thinks about that. And those people have the most protection with the Secret Service, and other people don’t have the same kind of protection. So look, we’ve got to rediscover the great American tradition of nonviolence and Dr. King and the civilizing movements that have always opposed violence versus the violent groups that have used violence historically, beginning with the Ku Klux Klan, in order to terrorize other people.

MARGARET BRENNAN: Congressman Raskin, thank you for joining us, and we’re glad you were able to do so. We’ll be right back.