California Sen. Adam Schiff thinks America is going backwards.
Schiff came to USC as part of the Carmen and Louis Warschaw Distinguished Lecture Series, which explores Jewish voices in politics. The event took place on Sunday at 6 p.m. and was moderated by Richard Fliegel, Dornsife’s Associate Dean of Undergraduate Programs. It explored topics such as religious faith, civil service, election security and President Donald Trump’s time in office.
“Our whole lives and up to a few years ago, we were living in a world that was ever increasing in its freedom…” Schiff said. “We thought this was Martin Luther King’s moral arc of the world, always bending towards justice. Until suddenly it wasn’t bending towards justice.”
The event kicked off with Fliegel asking Schiff about his childhood and Jewish background. Schiff said that while his Jewish faith was “largely responsible” for his interest in public service, in his youth, he wasn’t fully sold on the institution of religion.
“I looked around the world and saw the troubles in Northern Ireland, saw the endless conflicts in the Middle East, Asia, and elsewhere that were so often driven by religious differences,” Schiff said. “It made me question the whole enterprise and whether it was responsible for more pain and conflict than it provided a public good.”
Schiff said he grew to appreciate religion, and his interest in religious world events brought him to politics. He lost two elections before running for the California State Senate. He decided he had “one more try” in him, despite his previous losses, not wanting to regret the decision not to run.
“You run once, and a lot of people are like, ‘What are you doing… why do you think you can do this?’ There’s a lot of skepticism. It doesn’t matter who you are. You lose and you run again, it’s like, ‘Oh my god, he’s doing it again,’” Schiff said. “You lose twice? And you run a third time? You start to be put in the gadfly category.”
Luckily for Schiff, that third bid for office worked. He was elected to the State Senate and focused on issues that still affect Los Angeles residents today, such as transportation policy.
“I represented communities that were both for the completion of freeways, and against it, which made it very challenging to represent both communities,” Schiff said. “It became very apparent that while folks wanted freeways to move the traffic out of their community, communities also didn’t want to be next to a freeway and suffer all the pollution and the noise.”
He pushed an initiative for a light rail in Pasadena, the third rail of the LA Metro. Schiff admitted that the metro still had problems, such as a lack of ridership and network expansion, despite its growth. He said he still believes that the metro is a “really important way forward.”
Fliegel moved the conversation to Schiff’s experience as a United States Representative for California District 28, including his vote to go to war with Iraq, which Schiff has since said he regretted. Schiff said that his vote taught him the limits of American military intelligence and the biases of career public servants.
“Even dedicated public servants feel a kind of pressure from a president who wants to undertake a certain action, to conform their opinion to what the president wants to hear,” Schiff said.
He said that America is seeing this conformity “on steroids” with the current administration. Schiff said that Trump’s bombings in the Caribbean Sea were a prime example of him overstepping his authority in the executive branch.
“The president has said he has the authority to do this because he put narco-trafficking organizations on a secret list,” Schiff said. That’s their legal rationalization: put these organizations on a secret list. “And if that’s a legitimate, satisfactory answer to usurping Congress’s power to declare war, there is no congressional power left.”
He connected to what he learned from his vote on Iraq: the dangers of presidential control over a party’s agenda.
“Like so much else that’s happened right now, these constitutional provisions in, I think, the most brilliant constitution in the world are completely insufficient if one party gives itself wholly over to a president of their party,” Schiff said.
Part of this control, Schiff said, can be ascribed to the court case Trump v. United States (2024), which grants the president legal immunity for any decisions made for the office.
“He is immune, and acting like he is immune,” Schiff said.
As a House Representative, Schiff led the first impeachment inquiry against Trump in 2019.
The event also contained a question-and-answer section, in which four students submitted questions for Schiff to answer: Ruby Belt, Eleanor Love, Channing Mack and Wesley Clum.
Love, a senior majoring in Public Policy, asked about youth involvement in public service occupations.
“I would say that notwithstanding all the difficulties, it’s still tremendously interesting, very, very gratifying that you can help people,” Schiff said. “If you’re intellectually curious, there’s just no better job… I hope you’ll pursue it.”
Love said that despite the pessimism surrounding politics right now, that answer alleviated some of her worries.
“I’m really interested in public service, I’ve always been interested in politics, and we’re in a really fraught time right now…” Love said. “He talked about the need to stay courageous and continue to be resilient in public service. I think his response was really encouraging.”
Schiff had other motivating words for the students in the audience.
“For those of you who are students here, you probably don’t remember anything other than this,” Schiff said. “You were probably young teens when he was first elected to office. You probably think it’s always been this ugly and nasty. It hasn’t.”
He said that students and universities were best suited to fight against the “daily firehose of falsehood” that has become a problem in the country.
“Universities and scientists have become targets because they are places that deal with objective fact,” Schiff said. “Their reason for being is a search for knowledge. You are uniquely in a position to defend our democracy by defending truth, fact and the scientific inquiry. We need you to stay strong.”
Another student in the audience, Amanda Musinski, a senior philosophy, politics and law major, was, similarly to Love, grateful to hear Schiff’s words.
“The words he said for how we should approach the future really appealed to me just because it’s such a divisive time,” Musinski said. “It’s difficult to see a way forward. Him telling us that we essentially just have to weather the storm right now, but that there is a light at the end of the tunnel, I think that is a message a lot of us have to hear.”
Other university members also found the event impactful.
“I thought about how brave he is. I really appreciated his courage and honesty,” said Steven Ehrlich, a part-time architecture professor. His guest, Nancy Griffin, added that she felt Schiff stood for truth.
Schiff said that while the country was so divided, he was going to continue fighting for his cause.
“I’m grateful for one thing about where I am in this moment in time, and that is I’m grateful and I can do something about it,” he said.