Jamie Raskin Is the Calm at the Center of America’s Most Chaotic Congress
Congressman Jamie Raskin’s office is busy. It’s the summer interns’ first day, one staffer explains. Constituents and aides flutter in and out of the small lobby, somehow still spacious considering the generally cramped conditions the House’s quarters are renowned for. Everyone is watching the clock, everything is running a little behind schedule.
Raskin himself seems unfazed. The four-term Democratic representative from Maryland has seen it all before. When we sit down in the comparatively quiet sanctum of his office — which doubles as a central meeting room — he’s the picture of relaxation.
At a time when Congress, and particularly the Republican-led House of Representatives, has been dominated by chaos, infighting, conspiracy-driven investigations, and very little actual legislating, Raskin — ranking member of the powerful House Oversight Committee — has emerged as a stabilizing force for Democrats looking to cut through the noise.
A former constitutional law professor, Raskin’s encyclopedic knowledge of the nation’s founding documents serves as the unshakable foundation of his approach to governance. In the face of the GOP’s grandstanding and the sloppy weaponization of legislative powers to pursue partisan projects, his rhetorical style is cutting without being condescending. He knows his shit, and he’s not afraid to say it — whether he’s giving Republicans impromptu constitutional history lessons or making sure Marjorie Taylor Greene can’t get away with breaking committee rules.
The return to constitutional principles, to what “the founders intended,” is often associated with reactionary right-wing politics. Raskin, who is also the vice-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, sees things differently, appreciating the Constitution not as an incarcerating document holding Americans hostage to the whims of 18th-century men, but as a living and often deeply misunderstood framework for the betterment of the country. He’s taking his message on the road as the election approaches, working with candidates and voters to drive home that America’s democracy is in peril, and that cynicism won’t save it.
Rolling Stone sat down with Raskin last month to discuss many of the factors threatening the nation’s founding principles, from Donald Trump’s candidacy, to a compromised Supreme Court, to the congressional Republicans who have abandoned their legislative duties in service of a convicted felon.
How do you see your role as the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee — especially as it seems like Republicans’ sole goal is to stir up chaos in service of Trump?
I would say the opposite of chaos is education. I told the members when we got started, that we’re the “truth squad” and we’re going to counteract all of the disinformation and propaganda with truth. But in my more ambitious and aspirational days, I want to think that we’re in the business of educating the public about the constitutional system of government we have. Which is imperiled today.
You’ve developed a good model of cutting through all of the GOP noise in hearings and drawing things back to the actual legislative role of Congress, the topic at hand, and at times even the Constitution itself. What’s your playbook for approaching these hearings?
I want to try to believe the best of all of my colleagues, and I want to believe that everybody is here to advance the common good under the Constitution. I want to believe that we’re here to fight for the public interest. And, of course, people will disagree about stuff. That’s the beauty of democracy. We have a diversity of viewpoints.
To me, legislative rhetoric is actually a respectable art form when it’s done right. It forces us to study history, and to study the substance of issues, and then to try and treat other people with civility and respect. That’s why I was so outraged by what Marjorie Taylor Greene did [when she attacked the appearance of Rep. Jasmine Crockett]. Because you’re not showing people respect when you start talking about their fake eyelashes. So that’s not fair.
I can’t say that I have ever really wanted to embarrass my colleagues.
What did that back and forth between Reps. Greene and Crockett show us about the current dynamics of the committee?
Donald Trump has set a model of incorrigible lawlessness in the GOP. He has a spectacular disrespect for law, rules, conventions, values, and manners. Where does somebody like Marjorie Taylor Greene get the idea that she doesn’t have to pay any attention to rules of parliamentary procedure? It comes directly from the boss, and Trump is now the undisputed, incontrovertible master of the GOP.
They set a hearing for 11 a.m. then overnight postponed it until 8 p.m. so that a bunch of their members could join the spiritual pilgrimage up to Donald Trump’s criminal trial. Speaker [Mike] Johnson started that by going up there to express his solidarity and encouragement to Trump. So you have a theocrat and self-proclaimed biblical adherent going to praise an adjudicated sexual assailant and fraudster on trial for paying $130,000 in hush money to his porn star mistress, and then cooking the books to cover it up.
They may or may not have been drinking on the way back, depending on which reports you believe. They were spoiling for a fight. You can talk about substance, issues, process. You can invoke science, literature, art, politics, history. But you cannot engage in ad hominem attack, and she attacked Jasmine Crockett’s eyelashes.
The agreement we negotiated was that she would withdraw her words and engage in an apology. But she wouldn’t. She just wanted the right to withdraw her words without having them taken down because if we take your words down, you can’t speak for the rest of the day. Chairman [James] Comer was unwilling to take her words down, withdraw her words, or compel her to engage in an apology. So we pressed the point of taking her words down, and it was a vote along party lines, except that Lauren Bobert voted with the Democrats.
Yeah, they don’t like each other.
Yeah, no love lost there. And then Congresswoman Crockett, who’s nobody’s fool and an excellent lawyer posed the … hypothetical.
An excellent use of alliteration: Bleach blond, bad built, butch body.
It was a hypothetical parliamentary question, albeit a cutting, thinly veiled one. I warned Chairman Comer, that if he did not enforce the rule against personalities and ad hominem attacks, that there would be no end to this. Because it would be an invitation to people to do it. And that’s essentially what happened.
Does it feel like Chairman Comer has lost control of some of the members of his caucus?
Yeah. He asked her to go along with our suggestion so we could move on. And she said no. It was a failure of leadership, in addition to being an outrageous violation of legislative decorum on her part.
It’s pretty clear that GOP gridlock in the House is often directly tied to efforts by Republicans to obstruct President Joe Biden’s policy agenda. Biden has a pretty strong record on a lot of key issues but it doesn’t feel like it’s really breaking through in terms of voter perception. Does there need to be a shift in how Democrats are communicating with voters, or is it enough to point to Trump and the threat to democracy?
I believe democracy is the essential point. But we need to make clear that democracy delivers for the people. It’s democracy which allowed us to pass something like the [Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act] that has put $1.2 trillion into the bridges, highways, roads, ports, airports, and other infrastructure projects. The autocrats in Moscow, the kleptocrats in Mar-a-Lago, and the theocrats in MAGA are not going to provide for the delivery of public goods through the democratic process.
We can’t talk about democracy as an abstraction. We have talked about democracy as the system of government that promotes the public good against private, selfish interests. There’s a war going on between the idea of government as an instrument of the common good versus the idea of government as an instrument of private self-enrichment for the guy who gets in and his family.
Going into this election, are there any specific areas where you feel Democrats need to reinforce their messaging and strategy?
I’ve been to 20 states now, campaigning. There’s a lot of concern and anxiety about Donald Trump still being a political threat, and Trumpism still being alive after all these years. I do think that that is the organizing logic of this campaign.
Young people across America are justifiably concerned about the galloping dynamics of climate change, about war and oppression all over the world, the rise of dictators and autocrats. Young people just have a lot of legitimate fears about where everything is going. My message has been that we need them in the Democratic Party. We need their voice, we need their vision, and we want them to be involved.
For a lot of my colleagues in Congress, and for President Biden, this will be their last campaign as politicians. But it is the first campaign for the new generation, and we need to be invested in America’s future. There are lots of different things young people are concerned about and interested in, and we need to hear about all of them. We need them to be involved, not in the sense of them sitting back like passive consumers judging the Biden campaign — we need them engaged as participants.
Yeah, the criticism neither party is immune from is that politicians are getting very old. How does one usher in the new generation when there’s so much entrenchment?
I mean, generational politics has always been a force in American history. There’s nothing new about that. The politicians that you see as dominant today, are not going to be dominant in 10 years. They will be gone. It will be a whole new generation, that’s just built into our process.
If young people are feeling impatient to occupy more important roles, I think that’s great. I want them to be impatient. There’s nothing unique about that feeling. What’s special about this moment is that we have — demographically — a huge infusion of young people. They can make the absolute difference in this campaign. They have a lot of perspectives that are distinctive about what’s going on in America and around the world, so we totally need them involved.
If I meet young people who tell me they’re feeling cynical or jaded or apathetic — and it’s pretty rare, but it happens — I tell them that that is an absolute political strategy being advanced by Vladimir Putin and Steve Bannon and Donald Trump. They want you to feel cynical, and they want you to feel apathetic. That’s the source of their power. But when young America wakes up, and decides to take the reins in this election, it’s all over for Donald Trump and his team.
You were a professor of constitutional law for years. You regularly refer back to the founding documents in a scholarly way, not just the usual platitudes that a lot of people expect from politicians. Is there one particular misconception about the founding documents, or principles, that really bothers you?
Yeah, and this one is not partisan in any way, because you get it across the political spectrum. But people will get up and say, including my beloved Nancy Pelosi, we have three co-equal branches. And I just don’t believe it for one second.
I know that’s what a lot of third-grade school teachers say — that we have three co-equal branches. But in fact, America was conceived in a revolution against a monarchy, against a king, and vested power in “We the People.” And then after that preamble the very next sentence is “all legislative power is vested in the Congress of the United States.” So the preamble basically establishes the people’s right to create the Constitution for these purposes. And then that awesome popular power flows right into Congress.
Article One lays out all the powers that the House in the Senate have to regulate commerce domestically and internationally, to coin money, to fight the pirates, to exercise exclusive legislation over the seat of government, and so on. And then even in Article One — Section 8, Clause 18 — the power to make “all laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into execution the foregoing powers.”
Then you get to Article Two, the president. What’s the president’s main job? To take care that the laws are faithfully executed. The Articles of Confederation didn’t even have a president. So then a president was added just to implement the laws adopted by Congress.
One of the four short sections in Article Two is all about how you can impeach a president for treason, bribery, and other high crimes and misdemeanors. Why is it that Congress has the power to impeach, try, and convict the president and the president does not have the power to impeach, try, and convict members of Congress, if we’re co-equal?
So co-equal — which, by the way, is not even a word — is not the Constitution’s design, and the Supreme Court — although it would like to think at this point, it’s supreme and acts quite imperialist — is clearly there just to elucidate what the law is.
What do Democrats need to be doing now to mitigate the effects of a deeply partisan Supreme Court that is increasingly acting like a legislative body?
Well, I think that that’s exactly the right question. You know, we have to defend elementary ethics at the Supreme Court. I never imagined I would see the day when Supreme Court justices had their own billionaire sugar daddies. It’s just an outrageous situation that reflects the profound corruption of right-wing politics today. That corruption accompanies the thoroughgoing assault on the freedoms of the people.
There’s been a lot of talk about expanding the Supreme Court or implementing a binding code of ethics. Are those feasible?
We need to be playing defense and offense. On the defensive side, we must defend the ethical principles that exist right now. The Supreme Court in prior years has struck down cases in both the state and federal systems where judges failed to recuse themselves. We have to make clear that justices [Clarence] Thomas and [Samuel] Alito are objectively compromised and disqualified because of various actions they or their wives have engaged in with respect to January 6.
But more expansively, we do have to go on offense and demand a binding ethics code in the Supreme Court. A solicitor general at the Supreme Court or some other binding process for dealing with this recurring corruption. In the future, we can talk about other kinds of structural reforms. But these are the emergency conditions we’re in.
Speaking of Jan. 6, Trump is already refusing to outright commit to accepting the results of this election, and his allies have made clear they’re willing to challenge outcomes. What needs to be done between now and the election to protect the integrity of the process?
It’s a massive and complicated question that we need to be addressing at every level. The Supreme Court, of course, has decapitated the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County v. Holder. So we need specific mobilizations in various states throughout the union where voting rights are under attack. That’s the ground level.
Then we need to, again, go state-by-state to figure out what needs to be happening to defend the voting machinery and the electoral process against attacks by the Republican Party and third-party groups.
Then we need to try to insulate the antiquated Electoral College system from different kinds of political subversion and attacks like the kinds that we saw Donald Trump engaging in in 2020. There will be even more serious threats this time than there were before. We need to make sure that the peaceful transfer of power is protected against violent attack in a meaningful way.
We’ve taken some measures to improve the January 6 process. It’s been made clear that the vice president cannot just run away with the football and declare who is president. We’ve made it more difficult to engage in the sweeping attacks on the receipt of Electoral College certificates of ascertainment from the governors. So we’ve made some minor changes there.
But in the final analysis, tyrants and despots don’t respect any legal changes — and that means we need to be vigilant and prepared for mutating assaults.
It definitely feels like the Trump camp is letting everyone know that they’ve — for lack of a better term — learned from their mistakes in the sense that they know what didn’t work in 2020.
The political scientists tell us that the surest sign of a successful political coup is a recently failed one — where the coup plotters are able to diagnose the weaknesses in the existing system. We’ve been working to try to repair those, and then also to mobilize the people to be ready to defend the election.
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