Congressman Jamie Raskin (D-MD), chair of the House Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties and lead impeachment manager on Donald Trump’s second impeachment, shares his thoughts about January 6th, its aftermath, partisanship, and the nature of political institutions.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Harvard Political Review: Congressman, you were the lead House investigator in Trump’s second impeachment, you were there on the House floor, and you had just lost your son. Yet, when it came to fighting back against tyranny, you were there, congressman. You called Pelosi’s request for you to be the lead investigator as a lifeline and made a passionate plea for the senators to hold Trump to account. They didn’t. So, what was going through your mind during the whole process – how was it for you to live through the same experiences again and again almost every day, look back at those horrific videos, and then culminate the whole experience with a denial of conviction to the President?
Jamie Raskin: Well, you ask some tough questions, and I wrote a whole book really trying to answer the questions you just posed to me. But I basically felt I had no choice. I felt that Tommy was with me, he was in my heart, I could feel him very much in my chest and I felt that I needed to participate in this struggle to defend democracy because Tommy was someone who wanted a lot more from democracy, not a lot less. He would have wanted me out there with my colleagues, struggling to defend our institutions against this fascistic assault on America.
HPR: We recently marked one year since January 6. In that context, what do you think has changed around the Capitol and with respect to the relationships between Congresspeople?
Raskin: It has deepened the partisan divide in one sense, because a number of our GOP colleagues who denounced the insurrection at the time, called it terrorism, called it unacceptable, have now backtracked and retreated from that position, as Donald Trump reestablished his hegemony over the GOP. And that’s created some real difficulty. On the other hand, the Republicans who have stood up as constitutional patriots, for our democracy, have created a far more vibrant bipartisan collaboration and energy than I’ve ever seen in Congress in a long time.
HPR: You are, however, a strong proponent of bipartisanship too. And, I think that one of the biggest arguments that the youth of today often makes is how are we to have any faith in our institutions, how are we to look forward to bipartisanship if all the other side does is vehemently deny the verity of facts, reality, et al. I think the youth really struggles with the ability to have an argument with those on the other side- so, in a situation like this where do you think the hope for bipartisanship comes from?
Raskin: I think we need to have a rigorous examination of what partisanship is: what are parties? And in that context, I want to offer two cheers for partisanship. The founders had a schizophrenic attitude just like the political parties today. On one hand, they denounced factions and engaged in a lot of high-minded rhetoric. Richard Hofstetter, the historian, said that our constitution was a constitution written against political parties.
Going all the way back, even Jefferson, after the 1800 election was over at his inauguration, said- we are all Republicans, we are all Federalists!. That in itself is a real important strain in presidential oratory. I mean, it’s like Lincoln saying we are not enemies, we are friends, we must not be enemies, or Obama saying we’re not the red states of America, we’re not the blue states of America, we’re the United States of America.
However, despite all the high-minded rhetoric, the framers themselves were bare-knuckled, partisan brawlers down in the mud. I mean, you look at that 1800 race between Jefferson and Adams. These guys were partisan actors themselves. So I think we need less high-minded rhetoric about partisanship and more sober-minded realism about partisanship and the fact that political parties are good. They’re a reflection of the First Amendment. If you go to a society that doesn’t have the basic freedoms – if you go to a one-party state, you’re not gonna find partisanship. Partisanship is just a reflection of people having different views and that’s the sign of health and oxygen in a political system.
The political parties help to articulate policy differences to clarify them for the public and help to organize the public and to motivate, and educate voters, especially in America where the government doesn’t even take responsibility for registering people. The political parties have to do that. So political parties, once the election is over, try to translate their agendas into legislative action and programs. So, I say two cheers for parties.
What’s the problem?
Well, the problem is what happens after the election is over. Those of us in public office need to remember where the word ‘party’ comes from. It comes from the French word, ‘partie’, which means ‘apart’, each party is a part of the whole. We have to try to stand up for the whole and to legislate in everybody’s interest and act in everybody’s interests. And I’ll give you an example to prove that we know how to do that. If you come to my district office. in Rockville, Maryland, and you have a problem, whatever it is, we will fight for you. We never asked if you were a Democrat, a Republican, or a libertarian. We serve everybody, as long as they live in my district. And I just think that’s the attitude that all of us have to have. And it’s not bipartisan, it’s nonpartisan or it’s transpartisan.
If we could take that attitude that we have about constituent service that we owe to everybody and transpose it to legislative action, then we’re going to be in a much stronger position. We need that thinking cap on when it comes to something like an impeachment, where senators have swore not one but two oaths that bear on their responsibility not to think in partisan terms. What does impartial mean if not non-partisan? And so, the 43 Republican senators who decided to acquit Donald Trump essentially betrayed their oath of office, and they acted in a deeply partisan way. The great irony is that their partisan cult leader Donald Trump is about the least partisan person you can think of, in reality, he was a Democrat for most of his life, he wanted to run for President on the Reform Party ticket, and he said he was only going to go to the Republican Party because he thought that’s where the stupid people were, and they would vote for him. Where’s the partisanship in that?
HPR: To switch gears a little bit towards the importance of institutions. Recently the US Supreme Court has gained enormous power and assumed the position of one of the strongest branches of government.. For Hamilton, in Federalist 78, the Supreme Court was supposed to be the weakest branch of government, yet, recently, it has accumulated so much power that a lot of arguments have been made against the power that we can afford to give it. In light of the fear that the Supreme Court can change, the hopelessness, and the pessimism, what is your opinion on the Supreme Court’s position in modern American society?
Raskin: The Supreme Court enjoys a faint halo that it doesn’t deserve. And it comes from the Warren Court period with decisions like Roe v. Wade, Brown v. Board of Education, Miranda v. Arizona, etc. For basically three decades, the court was generally on the side of constitutional progress and the rights of the people but for the vast majority of its history, it’s been a profoundly reactionary institution.
If you think about the Supreme Court in the context of the century before the Civil War, it did absolutely nothing for the enslaved population other than to constitutionalize and cement the whole system in Dred Scott v. Sandford. So, when my colleagues say that you shouldn’t be able to teach doctrines of racial superiority in public schools, they’re making it impossible to teach many of our most important landmark Supreme Court decisions including Dred Scott and then Plessy v. Ferguson, because the Supreme Court even after the addition of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, found that Equal Protection was perfectly consistent with Jim Crow.
The Supreme Court today has returned to its traditional historical baseline. The Burger Court, the Rehnquist Court, the Roberts Court, have utterly backtracked from the progress that the Court was making for the rights of Americans during the Warren Court period. So, I think we must remember that the Supreme Court has been a political institution from the beginning. Some would say it’s inescapably or essentially political but the right-wingers in Congress have turned it into an absolute political pawn today and we expect that the GOP agenda will be completed with their overturning of Planned Parenthood v. Casey and Roe v. Wade. Everybody, at least on my side of the aisle, needs to fall out of love with the Supreme Court. We need to fight as hard as we can to get the right people on it and against all of the strategic trickery of Mitch McConnell and get good people, people who can fight for progress, on the Court.
