Unthinkable

Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy

Jamie Raskin

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780063209800
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

A #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER.

In this searing memoir, Congressman Jamie Raskin tells the story of the forty-five days at the start of 2021 that permanently changed his life—and his family's—as he confronted the painful loss of his son to suicide, lived through the violent insurrection in our nation's Capitol, and led the impeachment effort to hold President Trump accountable forinciting the political violence.

On December 31, 2020, Tommy Raskin, the only son of Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin, tragically took his own life after a long struggle with depression.Seven days later on January 6, Congressman Raskin returned to Congress to help certify the 2020 Presidential election results, when violent insurrectionists led by right wing extremist groups stormed the U.S. Capitol hoping to hand four more years of power to President Donald Trump. As our reeling nation mourned the deaths of numerous people and lamented the injuries of more than 140 police officers hurt in the attack, Congressman Raskin, a Constitutional law professor, was called upon to put aside his overwhelming grief—both personal and professional—and lead the impeachment effort against President Trump for inciting the violence. Together this nine-member team of House impeachment managers riveted a nation still in anguish, putting on an unprecedented Senate trial that produced the most bipartisan Presidential impeachment vote in American history.

Now for the first time, Congressman Raskin discusses this unimaginable convergence of personal and public trauma, detailing how the painful loss of his son and the power of Tommy's convictions fueled the Congressman's work in the aftermath of modern democracy's darkest day.Going inside Congress on January 6, he recounts the horror of that day, a day that he and other Democrats had spent months preparing for under the correct assumption that they would encounter an attempted electoral coup—not against a President but for one. And yet, on January 6, he faced the one thing he had failed to anticipate: mass political violence designed to block Biden's election. With an inside account ofleading the team prosecutingPresident Trump in the Senate, Congressman Raskin shares never before told stories of just how close we came to losing our democracy that fateful day and lays out the methodical prosecution that convinced Democrats and Republicans alike of Trump's responsibility for inciting insurrectionary violence against our government.

Through it all, he reckons with the loss of his brilliant, remarkable son, a Harvard Law student whose values and memory continually inspired the Congressman to confront the dark impulses unleashed by Donald Trump. At turns, a moving story of a father coping with his pain and a revealing examination of holding President Trump accountable for the violence he fomented, this book is a vital reminder of the ongoing struggle for the soul of American democracy and the perseverance that our Constitution demands from us all.

Part I

Chapter 1

Democracy Summer

It’s not incumbent upon you to finish the work, but neither are you free to evade it.

—THE MISHNAH

Tommy was my only son. A middle child and first-born boy born to a middle child and first-born boy, he was my greatest student, one who quickly became my greatest teacher, something like a best friend, too. He transformed me twice politically, once in his young life, when he helped me first run for office, and then again in death, when he filled my broken heart with purpose and strength.

When I first decided to go into electoral politics, it was 2006. I was forty-three, Sarah was forty-four. Hannah was thirteen, Tommy eleven, and Tabitha nine. At the time, all three of our kids were deeply engaged in political questions and all the neighboring puzzles of moral philosophy, but Tommy the most. When it came to politics of either the philosophical or practical kind, Tommy Raskin was a natural, a thoroughbred, bringing a piercing moral and global sensitivity to his interpretation of political problems. The curly-haired ragamuffin running up and down the aisle of the airplane giving everyone high-fives became a moral and political philosopher.

Even as a little boy, Tommy lived his life with a precocious integrity, and always identified with the underdog. He won an award in middle school for explaining to a group of older students why racist jokes were hurtful. He invited a large group of kids to go to the Blair High School senior prom together, regardless of whether they had dates, so that everyone would be included. He stood up in a high school class and objected to the fact that “people are cheating and no one seems to care that students are not learning the material but just copying it,” and then threw himself into a peer-to-peer tutoring program called Bliss, to help other kids learn course matter and prepare for their essays and homework. (“Tutoring is real helping,” he said. “Cheating helps nobody and just encourages the school bureaucrats to not educate us.”)

People think most seriously about morality when they are young and then when they have young children of their own. Having Tommy and two other kids who were serious about ethical action made me think a lot more concretely about my own future. I resolved that it was time for me to stop just writing law review articles, testifying and opining about stuff. I had been a constitutional law professor for sixteen years and had always had an essentially academic disposition. I am ardent for reading, writing, teaching, and being with young people, and for this reason, there is nothing in the world greater to me than a college or a university. But, when I was forty-two, I realized that the time had come for me to cross over from scholarship and punditry to fight for the things I believed in: to go into politics or resolve just to be a sideline critic.

I had always known that I had a strong political side in me, and politics runs deep in my blood. My maternal grandfather, Samuel Bellman, was the first Jew ever elected to the Minnesota state legislature way back in the 1940s; by the time I got to know him, he was a pillar of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party and of the legal establishment of Minneapolis and the Jewish community. During summer visits, we used to watch him solve people’s problems all day long while working either as a lawyer in court or a politician on the phone or just as a friend in conversation. When people ask me where I get my tolerance—no, my love—for constituent services (such as getting people their Social Security checks, VA benefits, unemployment compensation, or fair treatment by Medicare or some other bureaucracy), I always invoke my Grandpa Sam, who could be curmudgeonly and tough sometimes, but who always took the side of the underdog and who never turned away a constituent or a client, no matter how poor—for which he sometimes got paid in chickens and eggs.

My father’s side of the family, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, is also filled with political activists and leaders, like my famous great-uncle Max Raskin, the sainted Milwaukee judge and former city attorney. My paternal grandfather, Benjamin, whom I never met and after whom I was named—my parents turning the name around to make it “Jamin Ben Raskin”—was a plumber, first as a member of the plumbers’ union and then as the owner of his own small plumbing business. (Sarah will tell you I’m pretty helpless as a handyman anywhere else in the house, but that I can fix anything in the bathroom without even looking on the internet for help, because it’s in my genes.)

One day in 2005, I picked up the newspaper to learn that our state senator, Ida Ruben, who had been in office for thirty-two years and who was the president pro tempore of the Maryland senate, had introduced a pro–Iraq War resolution and a bill to dramatically expand the death penalty in our state. Further research revealed that, although she had definitely done some good things, Ruben had been helping block consideration of marriage equality, which she did not feel the state was ready for. This seemed scandalous to me, because I always took Silver Spring and Takoma to be the progressive heartland of Montgomery County, itself one of the two or three bluest jurisdictions in the state along with Baltimore and Prince George’s County. Maryland has a part-time legislature—just ninety days a year in session—and I decided I wanted to run for the state senate from District Twenty, Silver Spring and Takoma Park.

It was very weird going from just analyzing and criticizing things (the life of the law professor) to actually taking responsibility for changing and improving them (the life of the political representative). In the process of my becoming a candidate and political leader, Tommy became my key confidant and adviser—which may sound odd considering that he was eleven years old, but he was a natural-born political visionary and strategist, and he loved politics. His advice to me was soulful. A number of progressives were urging me to run for the state senate—like Mike Tabor, who wrote a column for the Silver Spring and Takoma Voice, then a major force in our community; and Marc Elrich, a Takoma Park city councilman and a Bernie-like 1960s radical who had been running unsuccessfully countywide and wanted to try again for the County Council with me on the ballot helping to galvanize a strong progressive network in the eastern county.

But the establishment Democratic politicians were skeptical and worked on me not to run. When Tommy and I would talk to delegates, senators, and power players, they discouraged us. At a countywide Democratic dinner that Tommy accompanied me to, a top official in Montgomery County said to us, “You can’t run because you can’t beat the Machine.”

Tommy asked him in an open and inquisitive way, “Who’s the machine?”

And this Democrat proceeded to name three or four people who would certainly be with the incumbent.

“Well, that’s four votes,” Tommy said. “What about the other one hundred and sixty thousand?”

This precocious lesson in the practical meaning of one-person, one-vote democracy made me smile and made the top power broker wince at the temerity of the eleven-year-old son-of-a-political-upstart.

That amazing lesson became my go-to answer when people asked how we were going to beat the Machine: “By majority vote,” I would say, “one person at a time.”

On a freezing day in January 2006, Tommy introduced me at my campaign kickoff, as did Tabitha. She said, “Please give my dad money; he really needs it.” And then Tommy said, “Yeah, he really needs your money.” Later in the campaign, he would introduce me by saying, “My dad loves our family a lot, and he loves our community a lot, too.”

At my kickoff, he took the photo—of me with the American flag in the background—that we used on our campaign literature, and he was, significantly, at my side after my stem-winder opening speech when a woman came up to me and said, “Great speech, Jamie. Loved your speech. But one thing—take out all the stuff you have in there about gay marriage, because it’s not going to happen. It’s never going to happen. Even the gay candidates don’t talk about it, and it makes you sound like you’re really extreme, like you’re not in the political center.”

I had to swallow hard—I didn’t have that many attendees at our sub-Arctic kickoff event, and I didn’t want to offend her. But then I looked over at my brilliant eleven-year-old son, my son who was taking pictures of me during the kickoff rally. He was looking up at me so hopefully, like I was something far greater than I ever was, and I felt myself becoming a little greater at that moment, because I had this sense that I needed to answer her in a way that was befitting the confidence of this remarkable boy whom fortune and destiny had bestowed upon us.

And I said to her: “Thank you so much for saying that to me, because it makes me realize that it is not my ambition to be in the political center, which blows around with the wind. It is my ambition to be in the moral center and to bring the political center to us. That is why I’m a progressive; that is why I’m a Democrat.”

After we launched that campaign, there was an article in a local newspaper quoting a pundit who described my chances of victory as “impossible”; and nine months later, when we got 67 percent of the vote, there was another article, in the Washington Post, quoting a pundit who said my victory was “inevitable.” So we went from impossible to inevitable in nine months because the pundits are never wrong, but as I told Tommy, we showed that nothing in politics is impossible, and nothing in politics is inevitable. It is all just possible, through the democratic arts of education, organizing, and mobilizing people for change. Tommy must have heard me tell that story a thousand times, but I know he internalized its message from the moment it happened.

Tommy was central to my experience of that first campaign. He helped me create the model that has defined all my campaigns, both the tough campaigns and the easy ones. I have always believed in the grassroots, person-to-person model of campaigning and have veered away from pollsters, TV ads, radio ads, focus groups, high-priced consultants, and negative campaigning—the kind of wholesale boilerplate campaign tactics that give me a headache.

To me, politics is, at its best, about education: educating people about the process, about the issues, about strategies for political change and policy breakthrough. Education about state government was important in our race because so many people in the Maryland suburbs of Washington read the Washington Post, watched the national news, worked in federal government or public policy, and focused on federal issues, not state and local ones. So we had the opportunity to teach people about how so many of the problems they were focused on (climate change and air and water pollution; education; the death penalty and criminal justice reform; marriage equality and the rights of people in the LGBTQ community) were profoundly affected by what our state government did.

But how could we compete against a long-term incumbent backed by machine politics, big money, and major organizational endorsements? I knew we would need to create an exciting campaign to move young people and then get them to convince their parents and grandparents to get involved; I had this deep instinct because of a book written by my hero Bob Moses, the philosopher-activist who helped turn the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the early 1960s into an historic force for sweeping change in Mississippi and throughout the South. Moses later launched the Algebra Project, which has made math literacy a central priority for the civil rights movement in the twenty-first century.

In his book Radical Equations: Math Literacy and Civil Rights (coauthored with Charles Cobb), Moses asks the question “How do you organize?” His answer is: you bounce a ball.

You bounce a ball, and some little kids come by to play, and then some bigger kids arrive, and then some high school and college kids, and you begin to talk issues with their parents, and then you organize.

Bob’s bouncing ball and remarkable human-scale organizing led to Freedom Summer; the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, the great challenge to Dixiecrat politics at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City, New Jersey; the Civil Rights Act of 1964; the Voting Rights Act of 1965; and the transformation of the Democratic Party. The racist backlash to SNCC and the changes it brought spilled a lot of blood, beginning with the murders of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner and of Medgar Evers and countless others who were sacrificed on the altar of violent white supremacy.

In our campaign, I told Tommy, we already had lots of adult volunteers, but we needed to recruit young people, too.

We needed to bounce a ball.

So Tommy set about to do just that, beginning with his sisters and many cousins. We had to make it fun. We invited all the young people to come to our free events, which were definitely going way outside the Machine, starting with a “Poets and Writers for Raskin” event that drew more than three hundred people in a snowstorm to hear from George Pelecanos, Ethelbert Miller, Judith Viorst, and dozens of others; a rally against the death penalty, with an innocent man freed from death row; a Texas barbecue and square dance with Texas populist Jim Hightower; and a rock concert with our beloved friend Dar Williams.

The key moment for young people was going to be in the summertime, when school was out, right before the September 6 primary. Tommy reported to me that he was having a hard time recruiting older cousins, the generation of teens like Emily, Zachary, and Maggie, and even my younger sister, Eden, to spend the (brutally hot) summer knocking on doors, making phone calls, and organizing events. The problem was, he told me, that “they say ‘What are they going to put on their résumé, that they worked for their uncle’s losing state senate campaign’?”

I could see the problem he was describing, and said, “Tombo, tell them, first, we’re not losing, and second, that they’re not really working on my state senate campaign. Tell them they are a fellow in . . . Democracy Summer!”

“What’s that?” he said, kind of smiling and bemused.

“We are going to recruit dozens of Democracy Summer fellows, who will get an intensive education from some of the greatest political thinkers, leaders, activists, and campaign managers in America, who live right here in our community and support our campaign. These student fellows are going to become experts on the issues of our times and learn state-of-the-art skills in how to win campaigns—and then we are going to unleash them throughout District Twenty. And I can write a college reference letter for anyone participating in Democracy Summer.”

Thus was Democracy Summer born. Our campaign knocked on more than 35,000 doors, and I knocked on 17,000 personally. I still meet people who tell me that I knocked on their door during that first campaign and that they gave me lemonade, or that we threw a football around with the kids.

We signed up more than sixty Democracy Summer fellows that first summer and derived a whole new model for how to run campaigns. Sixty in itself was a huge number of basically full-time volunteers, but the multiplier effect was unbelievable.

The fellows soon started showing up at canvasses, seminars, and picnics with brothers and sisters, friends, parents, teachers, and other kids who wanted to join. Tommy took twenty-five of my campaign T-shirts to Pine Crest Elementary School to give away, and when he ran out of those, he brought another twenty-five the next day. We were routinely welcoming hundreds of people to our events; one journalist asked me at a rally if I was running for state senate or president, because he had never seen crowds of that size in a state legislative campaign. One young supporter, Lucas Richie, son of my friends Cynthia Terrell and Rob Richie, refused to take off his “Jamie Raskin for Senate” T-shirt until primary Election Day (so we got him an extra one for the purposes of public hygiene). And Tommy learned how to organize: a brilliant young woman who went on to Howard University told me, after we lost Tommy, that he signed her up, two years after my campaign, to cochair the Obama campaign with him in school and changed the trajectory of her life.

The core of it all was constant learning and constant fun. Even the inevitable Machine backlash became a learning moment. When I won the endorsement of Blair High School’s Silver Chips, the great student paper at the largest high school in the state, the incumbent, Ida Ruben, reacted by calling the school’s principal and insisting that he threaten the student editors and reporters with suspension if they did not retract it and endorse her instead. But she picked on the wrong kids. She did not realize that they were endorsing me for my historic defense of student free-speech rights, a topic they knew something about. Pretty soon, the pages of the Washington Post were filled with detailed articles about the controversy and supportive editorials (“The Senator vs. Silver Chips”) deploring censorship of student political voices and praising the students for their activism. Voters saw TV specials and heard NPR stories about th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Preface
• Prologue: Democracy Winter
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Epilogue
• Acknowledgments
• Photo Section
• About the Author
• Copyright
• About the Publisher