on training day what he said to his son
Grieving Son's Death, Maryland Lawmaker Fights to Impeach Trump
Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, lost his 25-yr-erstwhile son to suicide on New Year'south Eve. And then he survived the mob attack on the Capitol. Now, he leads the impeachment effort.
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WASHINGTON — On the last awful day of the fell twelvemonth 2020, Tommy Raskin, a 25-year-onetime Harvard University law student, social justice activist, animal lover and poet, ended that the pain of the world was too deep for him to be in it anymore. He left his parents an amends, with instructions: "Delight wait afterward each other, the animals and the global poor for me."
Tommy Raskin was buried last week in a uncomplicated Jewish graveside service. The adjacent day, his father, Representative Jamie Raskin, constitute himself hiding with his Firm colleagues from a trigger-happy mob incited by President Trump, and fearing for the safety of a surviving daughter, who had accompanied him to the Capitol to witness the counting of electoral votes to seal Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s victory.
Within hours, Mr. Raskin was at work drafting an commodity of impeachment with the mob braying in his ear and his son'south terminal plea on his heed. It was introduced in the Business firm on Monday. On Tuesday dark, Speaker Nancy Pelosi appointed Mr. Raskin to lead the prosecution of Mr. Trump in a Senate trial.
"I'll spend the rest of my life trying to live up to those instructions," Mr. Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, said in an earlier interview, reading aloud the farewell notation equally he reflected on his family'south grief and the confluence of events. "Simply what we are doing this week is looking afterwards our beloved republic."
Mr. Raskin likes to say that "change is fabricated by people who show up." When the House convenes Wednesday to consider impeaching Mr. Trump for a second time, he volition accept to draw on every ounce of strength he has just to be in that location.
The slightly rumpled sometime constitutional law professor and son of a well-known liberal intellectual and antiwar activist has been preparing his entire life for this moment. That it should come simply as he is suffering the most unimaginable loss a parent can bear has touched his colleagues on both sides of the alley.
"I've been in awe of the personal strength and character he has shown through all of this, and we're all supportive of him as a person and his family," said Representative Tom Cole of Oklahoma, the top Republican on the House Rules Commission, who voted with 146 other Republicans to cake certification of Mr. Biden's victory. He added that Republicans regard Mr. Raskin as "a delightful homo."
Mr. Raskin is also a fellow member of the Rules Committee, the thirteen-fellow member panel with vast power to fix the terms of argue on the House floor. On Tuesday, the ii men clashed as the panel debated a resolution written by Mr. Raskin calling on Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment to strip Mr. Trump of the presidency. The Firm took up the measure out Tuesday night, with Mr. Raskin managing the flooring debate for Democrats.
"My personal stance is: 'With seven days to become, why practise you need this?'" Mr. Cole said in an earlier interview.
To that, Mr. Raskin has a short answer, and a long i. Offset, the brusk answer: "The people who are saying why impeach now really should be asking: Why does he continue to commit impeachable offenses up until the very finish of his term?"
The long ane, which Mr. Raskin, who has written 2 books on Supreme Courtroom cases, intends to evangelize Wednesday on the House floor, begins this way: "We came very close to experiencing a coup in America. It was like an attempted coup wrapped within a trigger-happy riot wrapped inside some cosmetic protests on the exterior."
He went on: "And the president gave all kinds of aid, comfort and exhortation to the mob. That is intolerable. It takes us in a profoundly dangerous direction every bit a guild. America is a land congenital on common sense. And we have to use our common sense at present to recognize a lethal danger to our people, our Congress, our leaders and the whole nation. This president is a clear and present danger to our country."
Mr. Raskin, 58, is an instantly recognizable figure in the Capitol; he was once described equally looking like a mad scientist, though he began slicking his hair down after that. He has an infectious enthusiasm for the Constitution and American history. He has been steeped in liberal activism since he was a toddler.
His father, Marcus Raskin, who died in 2017, was an aide to President John F. Kennedy and a vehement opponent of the Vietnam War. In 1970, the elder Mr. Raskin received part of the Pentagon Papers, the classified study of American conclusion making in Vietnam, from its author, Daniel Ellsberg, and helped get them to the reporter Neil Sheehan of The New York Times.
The younger Mr. Raskin keeps a 1964 clipping from The Washington Post with a photograph of him as a ii-year-former toting a placard at a protest. When he was 6, his father took him to the showtime Freedom Seder, a Passover repast that brought Jewish and Black people together a yr after the bump-off of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Thomas Blossom Raskin, named for the Revolutionary State of war figure Thomas Paine, was an heir to this legacy. He was the only son and second child of Mr. Raskin and his wife, Sarah Bloom Raskin, a deputy treasury secretarial assistant under President Barack Obama and former member of the Federal Reserve Board. They also accept two daughters, Tabitha, 23 and Hannah, 28.
Days after Tommy'southward expiry, his parents released an extraordinary, wrenching statement and photos of their son. He began life equally a "strikingly beautiful curly-haired madcap boy beaming with laughter and amuse," they wrote, who grew into "an antiwar activist, a badass autodidact moral philosopher and progressive humanist libertarian."
He "hated cliques and social snobbery," and "never had a negative word for anyone just tyrants and despots," they wrote, in an apparent innuendo to Mr. Trump — a bespeak that was not lost on those watching the congressman fight the president with and so much zeal. Tommy persuaded his parents to become vegans to spare the lives of animals, majored in history at Amherst College and went off to Harvard Law School, his parents' alma mater, in 2019.
But he "began to be tortured after in his 20s," they wrote, "by a blindingly painful and merciless 'disease called depression,'" that became unbearable for him, despite "very fine doctors and a loving family unit." In his brief note to his parents, the younger Mr. Raskin wrote, "My illness won today."
In the days since, the congressman said, he has found information technology difficult not to wonder what he might have done differently.
"I feel Tombo is very much with me and my middle, and I'1000 living very much in his life and in his spirit," he said, using his nickname for his son. "Only it's tough. I mean, y'all become drawn into a g questions about, 'Well, maybe we should have washed this, maybe we should have said that.' And it'due south merely a painful process, ultimately futile."
On Midweek, the solar day after Tommy's funeral, Congress was to vote to certify the Electoral Higher results. Mr. Raskin'southward girl Tabitha begged him not to become. Instead, he invited her and Hank Kronick, married man of his other daughter, Hannah, to come along for what he expected would be "a crazy day outside the building" only a historic one within.
His colleagues were not entirely surprised to run across him, said Representative David Cicilline, Democrat of Rhode Island and a shut friend of Mr. Raskin's who worked with him on the impeachment article. Democrats, he said, rely on Mr. Raskin as their in-house constitutional scholar.
"I call up he believes very securely in what he has defended his life to," Mr. Cicilline said, "and that is the pursuit of truth and justice and the defense of our Constitution."
Mr. Raskin arrived at the Capitol that 24-hour interval wearing a black mask to protect against the coronavirus and a slightly torn black ribbon on his lapel, the sign of a Jew in mourning. His House colleagues gave him a standing ovation equally he rose to speak shortly earlier 2 p.g.; he patted his paw across his middle, and went on to quote Abraham Lincoln. Then, he said, he heard what sounded similar "a battering ram" at the Business firm door.
Twelve hours and a lifetime afterwards, at shortly before 2:30 in the morn on Thursday, Mr. Raskin rose to speak again, this time denouncing "the baseless set on" on the Capitol, which, he said, brought to mind his son's namesake.
"Paine said, 'In the monarchies, the male monarch is the police,'" Mr. Raskin told his colleagues. "But in the democracies, the law will exist king."
If y'all are having thoughts of suicide, phone call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline at 800-273-8255 (TALK) or go to SpeakingOfSuicide.com/resources for a list of additional resource.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/12/us/politics/jamie-raskin-trump.html
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