'We Should Be Expecting a Lot More of Democracy': An interview with U.S. Representative Jamie Raskin.

AuthorStockwell, Norman

Jamie Raskin represents Maryland's 8th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives. He serves on numerous committees, including the House Judiciary Committee and the recently created House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. On January 12, 2021, he was chosen by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to be the lead impeachment manager for the second Senate trial of Donald Trump. For more than twenty-five years, Raskin was a professor of Constitutional law at American University in Washington, D.C. His newest book, Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy (Harper), will be released on January 4. We spoke by telephone on October 25.

Q: I want to start by asking about your role in the second impeachment of Donald Trump.

Jamie Raskin: I worked on the impeachment article with David Cicilline [Democrat of Rhode Island], Ted Lieu [Democrat of California], and Joe Neguse [Democrat of Colorado] on the evening of January 6, when we were all either in hiding or trapped in our offices. All of us agreed immediately that the President's incitement of the violent insurrection alone was the paradigmatic "high crime and misdemeanor." If that's not an impeachable offense, it's hard to know what would be.

Those guys actually took the lead in drafting the article. I spent my time working on a resolution to pass in the House, calling on Vice President [Mike] Pence to activate the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to transfer the powers of the President to the Vice President, because [Trump] had demonstrated himself unable to meet the powers and duties of office. I got to work more on the impeachment resolution in the next day or two, but I was focused for the first twenty-four hours on the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.

Remember, we thought we were in continuing danger from Donald Trump. He had clearly positioned himself outside the Constitutional order, and was waging a war on the election. And we didn't know what other potential assaults were coming.

Q: Do you think the Senate impeachment vote could have turned out differently?

Raskin: Well, this was a 57-43 result, which was the most sweeping bipartisan vote to convict in a presidential impeachment trial in U.S. history. We had ten Republicans in the House vote to impeach and seven Republicans in the Senate vote to convict--those were Republican Senators from New England, the Mid-Atlantic, the South, the Midwest, the West, and Alaska.

Trump still beat the Constitutional spread in that we didn't make it to sixty-seven [Senators]. But I do believe that we convicted him in the court of public opinion, and we convicted him in the eyes of history. That leaves us in this fundamentally...

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