These are the remarks made by Pat Cotter at the Indivisible Helena No Kings Rally on June 14, 2025 at Flag Plaza at the capitol in Helena.
Good afternoon.
What a wonderful crowd! Long ago the late Justice Louis Brandeis said: “The most important political office is that of private Citizen.”
You are living proof that he was right. Thank you for your patriotism and for
joining us today.
I am here to talk about the ominous threat to the rule of law posed by the
Donald Trump presidency. The foremost law of the realm is our US
Constitution and the law also includes the statutes duly passed by Congress
and the binding decisions of our courts. The rule of law holds that all persons, including those in government, are equal and accountable under the law. The ROL is the opposite of tyranny, as it contemplates a shared responsibility to protect our democracy.
Over 200 years ago, John Adams made this simple yet profound statement:
“We are a government of laws and not men.” What he meant is this: our country will be governed by our laws and NEVER by any one man who could impose his whims and ambitions upon our system of government. When asked if he agreed with John Adams, Donald Trump said: “I wouldn’t agree 100%. We are a government where men are involved in the process of law, and – wait for it – ideally you’re going to have honest men like me.” Well, Donald Trump, you are not an honest man; you are the man that put John Adams in fear for our country.
Our forefathers enshrined in our Constitution a division – a separation of
powers among three branches, so that no one branch could ever amass too
much power. So that we would never suffer under the despotic rule of a KING. In a government that ascribes to the ROL, Congress makes the law, the executive administers and enforces the law, and the judiciary interprets the law and ensures that it passes constitutional muster.
For nearly 250 years, this separation of powers has stood the test of time. But
now, Donald Trump has set out to dismantle our Constitutional protections and consolidate all power in himself. He has remade the executive branch into a personal fiefdom, replacing career employees with untrained loyalists and staffing his Cabinet with groveling admirers who will do whatever he says. He has turned the DOJ into a personal army of lawyers bent on exacting revenge against his perceived enemies.
And, without any protest from the majority party in Congress, he has
appropriated the law-making, spending and taxing powers explicitly reserved in the Constitution t o Congress, and has taken those powers unto himself. In hundreds of swaggering boastful executive orders, he has unilaterally imposed tariffs, fired thousands of government workers, eliminated Congressionally-created oversight boards and terminated domestic and international government programs that were under the exclusive authority of Congress. And unbelievably, our cowardly Congress has let him do it, abandoning their Constitutional duties and ceding their powers to him out of fear and self-protection.
So, in just 100 days, DJT has consolidated the powers of the both the executive and legislative branches under his sole repressive control. Already, our Constitutional system of separation of powers and checks and balances has broken down. As his OMB director Russell Vought recently put it, “We are now living in a post-constitutional era.” The question is whether we can stop this march away from democracy to autocracy before the collapse is complete.
It is now left to the judiciary to ultimately determine the outer limits of Trump’s power and hopefully save our Constitutional republic. Let me be clear: I do not agree with some of the decisions our SC has recently made, but the fact is that this is now the only institution with the power and hopefully the will to stop Trump’s advances. And he won’t go quietly.
Already facing multiple orders from courts attempting to rein him in, and
anticipating looming SC decisions, Donald Trump is waging a campaign to
delegitimize the judiciary in the minds of the public and undermine America’s confidence in the judicial system. Consider the remarks of his minions:
• Stephen Miller: We must stop radical judges who are usurping
presidential powers and laying waste to our constitutional system.
• JD Vance: Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s “legitimate”
powers.
• Press secretary Karoline Leavitt: Unelected judges are brazenly abusing
their judicial power to stop President Trump from carrying out the mandate that the American people gave him.
This is the signal the Trump administration is sending: The courts will not stop me. To make America great again, I must be free to fulfill my agenda without restraint by radical leftist judges. Any court orders that constrain my powers are obviously the product of a woke judicial system and are therefore
illegitimate. These judges must be ignored or impeached or both, to be
replaced by judges appointed by me who will see things my way.
Make no mistake: Donald Trump is taking a page straight out of the
authoritarian handbook. He has already assumed all executive and legislative
functions, and he is likely to defy any court order that slows him down. He is on his way – like his idols Orban and Erdogan – to establishing an autocracy, a
government not of laws but of one man. A government of a king. Friends, he is almost there now. And if we turn our heads away or stand by in silence, we will be all but complicit in America’s downfall.
Donald Trump proclaimed just this week that protesters hate this country. No sir. We are protesting because we hate the damage you are inflicting on the country we love. So, to quote Alexander Hamilton, we must RISE UP. Talk to your friends and family. Be heard. Send letters to the paper. Keep attending these rallies. And send a Howler or two to our cowering members of Congress and demand that they stand up to Donald Trump and reclaim their legislative power. America is our country to save. And we can do it if we persevere. Thank you all for your patriotism and your courage. We are in this together!