Impeachment, Amendments, Grief, and the Future of our Democracy: A Conversation with Congressman Jamie Raskin
Congressman Jamie Raskin (BA ‘83, JD ‘87) represents Maryland’s 8th Congressional District. In the House of Representatives, Raskin served as the lead impeachment manager for President Donald Trump’s second impeachment trial and serves on six committees, including the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol. Prior to his time in Congress, Raskin was a Maryland State Senator and a constitutional law professor. In his new book Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy, he discusses his experience in the January 6th attack and the subsequent impeachment trial, shaped by grappling with the incredible grief of losing his son Tommy to suicide only a few days before.
The interview below was conducted in the Spring of 2022. It has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Harvard Undergraduate Law Review (HULR): You were the lead impeachment manager in the second impeachment of Donald Trump. Can you speak about your role?
Jamie Raskin: I write in my book Unthinkable that Speaker Nancy Pelosi, in her wisdom and clairvoyance, threw me a lifeline when she asked me to be the lead impeachment manager. I was not really eating at the time; I was not really sleeping at the time. And the truth was I was so deeply in despondency and grief that I wasn’t sure that I would ever really be able to do anything of meaning or substance again. She basically challenged me to do the most difficult thing I’d ever done in my professional life because I had to organize the team of managers, develop our work plan, hire staff, and mobilize for trial in less than a month. So it was an awesome responsibility, but it became a kind of salvation and sustenance for me.
HULR: In your stirring closing remarks for the Trump impeachment trial in 2021, you said that “this case is about whether our country demands a peaceful, non-violent transfer of power to guarantee the sovereignty of the people.” Although Donald Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives, he was not convicted by the Senate. What implications might this have for the nation? Do you feel this was a dereliction of duty on the part of the Senate?
JR: The final vote on conviction was 57-43. This was the most sweeping bipartisan vote in the history of presidential impeachments in the Senate for conviction. There have only been four presidential impeachment trials in the Senate in our history: Andrew Johnson, Bill Clinton, Trump 1, and Trump 2. And here we had 50 Democratic Senators and 7 Republican Senators voting to convict Trump for inciting a violent insurrection against the Union. So, he did beat the constitutional spread because we didn’t make it to 67, but we convicted him in the court of public opinion, and I believe we convicted him in the eyes of history. So, the trial was a necessary exposition of the central role that Donald Trump played in inciting and organizing a violent insurrection against Congress and the vice president. Or, let me put it like this: the trial was a necessary exposition of the central role that the president played in organizing a violent insurrection against Congress to surround his inside political coup against the vice president. The way I see it, there was a mass demonstration that became a mob riot, which produced the injuries and wounds to more than 150 of our officers, surrounding a violent insurrection made up of the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, the Three Percenters, the militia groups, the QAnon networks, the 1st Amendment Praetorian, and a number of other domestic violence extremist groups. That insurrection ring surrounded the central activity, which was Donald Trump’s coup to overthrow Joe Biden’s majority in the electoral college and seize the presidency for four more years. So, I think the trial established the facts of what Donald Trump was doing in terms of incitement. But remember, the trial was just about one guy, Donald Trump, and one offense, incitement to insurrection. The charge of the January 6th Select Committee is much broader because it’s tasked with examining all the events of January 6th and all of the causes behind it, and then what must be done to prevent coups and insurrections going forward.
HULR: As a member of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, you have the arduous task of investigating the events surrounding the insurrection while being a survivor of the attack. How has this affected your work on the committee?
JR: Well, one of the things I record in Unthinkable is that, paradoxically, I felt no fear on January 6th because I was so consumed with my grief over Tommy. I essentially felt that the very worst thing that could ever happen to us had just happened, and there wasn’t much these fascists could do to make things worse, except to harm my daughter Tabitha, who was with me, and my son-in-law Hank. I was very concerned for them. But I didn’t feel any fear myself. I felt a lot of anger and outrage about what was taking place. So, I believe that we are in the fight of our lives for American democracy. This is an opportunity for every young person in America to stand up and be a champion of democratic institutions, practices, and values, against this new global right-wing authoritarianism that has come to America.
HULR: With all that, how do you stay hopeful for our future?
JR: My dad always used to say, when everything looks hopeless, you are the hope. So, I feel a great responsibility having been given such a great education at Harvard [College] and Harvard Law School and in other contexts, and having had a lot of opportunities in my life to enjoy the practice of democracy. I have a real responsibility to go out and fight with everything I’ve got to support it.
HULR: The Constitution is said to be a living, breathing document, but sometimes it doesn’t seem like it really is. If you had the ability to choose the 28th amendment, be it big or small, politically viable or completely ideological, what would it be?
JR: We have so many constitutional weaknesses and problems that need to be repaired. I suppose if I could choose one to get done immediately, it would be a constitutional amendment establishing a right to vote for every citizen at every level of government over him or her, establishing a national popular vote for president, getting rid of the electoral college, and instituting fair redistricting to overthrow the system of political gerrymandering. So I would say it would be a Right to Vote and Democracy Amendment. This would be consistent with the vast majority of amendments that we have enacted since the Bill of Rights. We’ve had 17 amendments [since then], and most of them have been democracy-perfecting, suffrage-expanding amendments. The 13th amendment abolished slavery, the 14th amendment gave us equal protection, the 15th amendment banned race discrimination in voting, the 17th amendment shifted the mode of election of US Senators from legislatures to the people, the 19th amendment gave us women’s suffrage, and so on. So, you can read the Constitution as a chronicle of the democratic struggles of the people and we need to get that process moving again. Tocqueville said that, in America, democracy is either always expanding and growing, or it’s shrinking and shriveling away. We’ve been in a contractionary period, and we need to get democracy moving again. That means protecting the right to vote and liberating ourselves from the dangerous confines of the obsolete electoral college. It also means getting the process of statehood moving again, so that we can admit people in Washington D.C. as a state since they are the only residents of a national capital on Earth who are disenfranchised in their own national parliament. We need to grant statehood to people in Puerto Rico as well. We have a lot of unfinished business to get to work on, and a more perfect union to create.
HULR: Would you say that the most promising way to get this universal right to vote would be a constitutional amendment, or through legislation, or in some other manner?
JR: By any means necessary. The right to vote is far safer when it’s enshrined in the Constitution. We’ve seen the Supreme Court eviscerate the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder and the [Brnovich v. Democratic National Committee] decision. At the same time, whilst necessary to put rights into the Constitution to make them stick, it’s not even sufficient to do that. The 15th amendment theoretically gave African American men the right to vote back in 1870, but disenfranchisement quickly followed the Reconstruction period, and African Americans didn’t really get the right to vote back until the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965. So, it’s better to entrench it in the Constitution, but even that is no guarantee.
HULR: How has being a constitutional law scholar influenced your role as a lawmaker?
JR: Well, I mean, you don’t have to be a lawyer or a legal scholar to be a lawmaker, but it definitely helps sometimes. Lawmaking requires an understanding of the constitutional foundations of law. I have felt a lot over the last several years that everybody knows one thing, and my ticket came up with constitutional law under the Trump administration because it has been an unending stress test for our constitutional system. I mean, he’s a one-man constitutional crime wave, and I’ve tried to keep up with his transgressions. So, for me, it’s been extremely helpful, but of course, there are people who have other kinds of expertise. I mean, I tell young people who want to go into politics that it’s important to develop some substantive expertise and experience before you do that. When I was in the state Senate, there was a guy who had been a Chief of Police, and everybody turned to him for law enforcement questions. There was a guy who had been a surgeon at Johns Hopkins, and everybody turned to him for medical questions. I got all the questions about constitutional law. And when you’re in a legislative body, people turn to you for your expertise. So, when I see young people who come in at age 21 or 22 and they tell me they want to run for state legislature or Congress or something, I say that it’s great that you got that urge, but you will be a far more effective and meaningful participant in legislative politics when you have some substantive expertise to share with your colleagues. There’s a danger that you go into a legislature and the only thing you know is about politics itself. You can very easily become a plaything in the hands of the leadership, and that you do not want to happen.