His highly personal memoir, Unthinkable, is out now.
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. 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.
At 2:12 p.m., rioters penetrated the innermost police barricade on the west side of the building, broke a window, and streamed in, near the Senate chamber. One minute later, the vice president was evacuated, and the Speaker, in the House chamber on the other side of the building, was escorted out. Within three minutes the entire House and Senate were ordered to be locked down.
“Anybody who suffers the traumatic loss of a loved one will tell you it makes you realize you have to put your family, friends, and loved ones first,” Raskin says. In Raskin’s view, this burst of speed emerged from an eerie new alignment between the crises of his public and private lives. “Anybody who suffers the traumatic loss of a loved one will tell you it makes you realize you have to put your family, friends, and loved ones first—maybe it’s really the thing that counts,” he explains, leaning forward. “How do we best honor the people we’ve lost? We treasure and take care of the people they loved.
“But you know what?” he goes on. “I love that. F.D.R. used to call the Democratic Party the Democracy, with a capital D. It is the party of the vast majority of people. It’s extremely diverse. It’s heterogeneous.” Disagreements, even messy ones, are part of the deal. “is not the highest value of political democracy—the highest value is universal inclusion and recognition,” he tells me. “The Republican Party is now extremely efficient because it operates under one guy.
In college, Tommy developed compulsive and self-punishing behaviors. He would go out drinking and then, the next morning, subject himself to a gauntlet of standardized tests to assure himself he hadn’t lost too many brain cells. He struggled with insomnia and depression, and, as Raskin put it to me, “felt the pain of the world sharply.
This, he thinks, is where his own private nightmare and his public work meet. “My father used to say, ‘When everything looks hopeless, you’re the hope,’ ” Raskin tells me. “Trauma can put you in touch with other people’s difficulties and pain and longing in a way that you were never able to be before.”
Raskin’s family had mixed feelings—being the public face of impeachment would make him a lightning rod—but by then he felt morally committed. “I confess my love for Nancy Pelosi, because she pulled me up from the depths of despair and loss,” Raskin says. “She wanted to make sure that I felt like I could do it, and in some deep way I knew that I could do it.
“That’s become harder for me since we lost Tommy,” he finally concedes, in a whisper. “When he said that to me—there’s a little bit of a compliment in it and a little bit of a reproach. The compliment is that I have a personality open to lots of different kinds of people. The reproach is that I can overly indulge people who are a threat to us.”
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