CNN Newsroom: Interview With Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY)
Interview
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Well, since the 1970s, there have been a series of policies, the one China policy, the Taiwan Relations Act, the three communiques, the six assurances. The combination of all those policies has brought decades of stability in the Taiwan Strait and the United States remains committed to preserving those policies. Whereas China is increasingly moving away from those policies. And China has displayed the kind of bullying and belligerence toward Taiwan that Russia had shown toward Ukraine, and that is unacceptable. That's a violation of the very policies to which China has agreed for decades.
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The expulsion of the two black Tennessee legislators represents the expulsion of democracy, it represents the expulsion of free expression. The Republican Party claims to be the party of free speech, the party against, quote, "political correctness and wokeness." And yet here you have Tennessee Republicans expelling two black Democrats for expressing their opinion, for exercising their First Amendment rights. You know, we live in a strange political world. If you're a Republican, like George Santos who systematically defraud and deceives his constituents, then the Republican Party will protect you from expulsion. But if you're two black Democrats who speak out against gun violence in the wake of a mass shooting then the Republican Party is going to punish you with expulsion. And there's something profoundly wrong with this picture.
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Look, what the Republicans in control of the House Congress is gridlocked, you know, these medication abortions represent half of all abortions in America. And the Texas decision to strike down FDA approval will not only affect abortion access in states where abortion is prohibited it will affect abortion access in states like New York where abortion is permitted.
So this is a particularly dangerous and outrageous decision because it represents a universal restriction of abortion in America, and no federal judge has the expertise to second guess the medical judgments of the FDA. Judge Kacsmaryk abused his power because he's essentially substituting his own politics for medicine.
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Look, we are galvanized, you know, especially with the reversal of Roe versus Wade. We saw what we're supposed to be a red wave reduced to nothing more than a red trickle. We saw record turnout among Democrats, and there's a real threat to reproductive rights here. I mean, the fact that a right-wing judge would remove a drug from the market that has had FDA approval for two decades over the objections of the FDA, I mean, that is just a level of right-wing judicial activism that we've rarely seen before. And we cannot take that threat lightly, and it will galvanize Democrats into action.
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My view is that we should allow the legal process to play out. The decision to indict Donald Trump was not made by politicians. It was made by a grand jury of his peers. And the concerted effort by House Republicans to systematically harass and intimidate a district attorney, that to me is profoundly unethical and it should be illegal.
You know, the indictment of Donald Trump sends a powerful message to the rest of the world that we in the United States were governed not by the rule of men, but by the rule of law, and that no one, not even a former president, is above the law.
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Look, the president has -- the former President Donald Trump has no shame. I mean, first he was attempting to incite violence in the lead-up to his indictment. And now he's attempting to personally attack a judge. It's unacceptable. But I think we learned from January 6th that Donald Trump has no regard for our democracy and he's willing to burn everything down, including our legal system in the service of his own self-preservation.
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Absolutely.
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