He spent a few days nearly catatonic, “rocking back and forth like a baby.” Then, on January 6, he rode down to the Capitol to try to work. “After searching frantically for my phone-which I had thrown high in the air when I came upon the scene-after dialing 911 and screaming after I tried to resuscitate him and get him to breathe by pressing repeatedly on his hard, beautiful chest…I floated through the house and under the grey winter sky, thinking perhaps I was gone forever, too,” Raskin writes in Unthinkable, his extraordinary new memoir of an extraordinary year. For Raskin and his wife and their two other children, this was the start of a nightmare. The previous Thursday, after preparing a breakfast smoothie, he had gone to the room where his 25-year-old son, Tommy, was staying while remotely attending Harvard Law School and had found him dead, a victim of suicide. Raskin, a Democrat who represents Maryland’s Eighth District, was entering his fifth year in Congress, having first been elected on the same night as Donald Trump.
#JAMIE RASKIN SON THOMAS FULL#
He said that Donald Trump was himself actually morally responsible for everything that took place, but he went back to a discredited argument about jurisdiction, saying that the Senate didn't really have power to try Trump then.Īnd that had been rejected on the first day of the trial.In the history of workweeks that start badly, few can compete with the one Representative Jamie Raskin began on January 6, 2021, his first full morning back in the Capitol since discovering the corpse of his son six days before.
#JAMIE RASKIN SON THOMAS TRIAL#
It's too bad, in my mind, that, at the end of the Senate trial of Donald Trump, when the vote was 57-43, McConnell went out and basically agreed with everything the impeachment managers had been arguing. So, I hope that Mitch McConnell, himself, will completely come back to his senses and say, this is all unacceptable. And that means that they're basically violating the basic precept of what it means to be a political party in a constitutional democracy. They don't accept the outcome of our elections. They don't accept our basic constitutional processes. They position themselves outside of the constitutional order. That's a pretty terrifying thing for a major political party. I mean, the party of Abraham Lincoln has become the party of Donald Trump, and Marjorie Taylor Greene, and real extremists who spout conspiracy theories and QAnon ideology all day long. And generations to come will look back on this as a period of terrible shame for the Republican Party, if it survives. I mean, the censure and continued hounding of Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger is scandalous. And so that's the beat-the-clock dimension to this.
We have done more than 500 interviews And depositions with people.īut it is that inner group of Roger Stone and Steve Bannon, the people right around Donald Trump, who have circled the wagons. So, to me, the real question is, when will we know the truth? Will we get the truth quickly enough? Will we be able to overcome the resistance in Trump's immediate entourage? Because the vast majority of witnesses have cooperated and come forward. What was the role of the Proud Boys? What was the role of the Oath Keepers? How were members of Congress working with the president to try to overthrow the election results and seize the presidency for another four years? How did a mass demonstration become a mob riot that injured and wounded 150 cops? People want to know exactly what happened. Well, yes, I do, because, in a democracy, where the people govern, there's a great hunger for the truth. And we're trying to continue on in his memory and in his spirit. He was a second year student in Harvard Law School when we lost him. He was an amazingly funny, lively young person. We, of course, think about him every single day. So, I think that will be an important part of his legacy. And he felt the pain of the world and the suffering of other people, whether it was victims of the civil war in Yemen or victims of bombings in different parts of the world.Īnd he wanted our democracy to be on the side of social justice and peace for people here and all over the world. He was a great champion of animal rights and welfare. And he was a great champion of human rights. You know, of course, the people that Tommy knew, his friends and his family, will always remember him and treasure him and love him for his brilliance, for his warmth, for his conviviality.īut, ultimately, I think the most remarkable thing about him was his just surpassing in infinite compassion for the world.
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