» READ MORE: I was a teen Watergate geek. In March, Raskin is all but certain to shine when the curtain raises on nationally televised, prime-time hearings into the January 6 plot - in a moment with historic echoes of the Watergate scandal. 1 on the New York Times best-seller list, and an admiring documentary is slated to air next month on MSNBC. But in the first half of 2022, the three-term congressman will be everywhere. Just 13 months ago, Raskin was unknown to voters outside of his suburban Maryland congressional district that stretches from D.C. Since then, as a key member of the House Select Committee investigating the pro-Trump coup efforts, the onetime constitutional law professor is fast becoming the face of the early 2020s’ defining issue: beating back the threats to democracy from the kind of fascism that pounded on the Capitol doors and continues to knock. ![]() Rather than retreat into grief, Raskin within a few days was leading the House effort to impeach and try Donald Trump for his role in fomenting the violent mob on January 6. ![]() Since that moment, Raskin has displayed a trait rarely seen in the wastelands of 21st century American politics: unflinching courage. He is showing me the way to some kind of safety.” He is occupying my heart and filling my chest with oxygen. But I am still in the land of the living, and Tommy is with me somehow every step of the way. “I have felt no fear today at all, for we have lost our Tommy Raskin, and the very worst thing that ever could have happened to us has already happened. “I feel no fear,” Raskin writes in his new book, Unthinkable. But then Raskin suddenly found himself sheltering from the January 6 insurrectionists, who were banging loudly on the doors of the House chamber and chanting “Hang Mike Pence!”Īs Capitol Police officers and harried staffers hustled Raskin and some colleagues into the hoped-for safety of the Capitol basement, the then-58-year-old Democrat was suddenly struck by what he was not experiencing at that fraught moment: fear. On the day after the funeral for Tommy Raskin, the congressman didn’t want to be alone so he brought one of his daughters and his son-in-law to the Capitol for what was to be the largely ceremonial certification of President Biden’s election victory. It wasn’t the tragic death of his 25-year-old son, Tommy, a brilliant law student who lost his fight against depression and died by suicide on New Year’s Eve at the end of 2020, but what came soon after. Jamie Raskin and launched a once fairly obscure member of Congress into a new orbit, leading the fight for the future of American democracy. There is one clear moment that changed the moral arc of Maryland Rep.
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