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Congressman Jamie Raskin urged students to resist feelings of apathy, hopelessness, and distrust, and encouraged them to become engaged with government and the political process during a Jan. 16 visit to Duke Law School.

“John Dewey said that the only solution to the ills of democracy is more democracy,” Raskin told a room packed with students. “There’s no time for apathy or cynicism. If you are ever going to devote one year of your life to defending democracy and the Constitution, don't wait. I think 2024 is the year.”

Raskin spoke with Kerry Abrams, the James B. Duke and Benjamin N. Duke Dean of the School of Law, as part of the “Lawyers and Leaders” interview series. 

A former professor of constitutional law, Raskin, a Democrat, is now in his fourth term representing Maryland’s 8th Congressional District in the U.S House of Representatives. He is married to Sarah Bloom Raskin, the Colin W. Brown Distinguished Professor of the Practice of Law and Senior Fellow at the Duke Center on Risk, whom he met while both were students at Harvard Law School. 

There, Raskin said, he “fell in love with constitutional law” studying with preeminent constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe — “my law school hero” — and exercised his passion for activism, demonstrating against investment in apartheid-era South Africa and working on other issues of the day. After graduating Raskin joined a prosecutor’s office, where he found himself less interested in trial practice than the legal problems at the heart of a case. 

“I realized I was just interested in the fundamental, bottom line theoretical questions,” Raskin recalled. ‘And so I said, ‘I’ve got to go become a law professor.’ And that’s what I did.”

For more than 25 years Raskin taught courses in constitutional law, legislative process, and the First Amendment at American University Washington College of Law. In 1993 he co-founded its Program on Law and Government, and in 1999 he founded the Marshall-Brennan Constitutional Literacy Project, which trains and sends law students to teach high school courses in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

Raskin won election to the Maryland State Senate in 2006 on a progressive platform and served there ten years before winning his Congressional seat, where he quickly made headlines questioning Russia’s influence in the election of Donald Trump. His outspokenness earned him seats on prominent committees, including the House Judiciary Committee and the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability, where he has been chosen the ranking member, and on the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.

Raskin said his scholarly expertise made him “that Constitution guy” when some of its lesser-known provisions emerged in the national conversation during Trump’s presidency, including the foreign emoluments clause that prohibits officeholders from accepting payments, presents, titles, and the like from any foreign state or its representative. 

“For those of you looking for interesting law review topics, the foreign emoluments clause is fascinating. And this is one of these passages in the Constitution that had just sort of been lying around for a long time and nobody did anything with it,” Raskin said. “Of course, it hadn’t been a real issue for a long time.”

From George Washington to Barack Obama, no president had ever seriously run afoul of the clause, he said, noting that Obama gave away the $1.4 million that came with his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize to avoid the appearance of violating the clause. But early in his presidency Trump was sued over the possibility of foreign influence through payments to his hotels, restaurants, and resorts. And according to a Jan. 4 report by Raskin and the Democratic staff of the House Oversight and Accountability Committee, several of Trump’s many businesses received at least $7.8 million from foreign governments, including the People's Republic of China and Saudi Arabia, during the first two years of his presidency alone, Raskin said.

Raskin’s national profile rose to new heights as he served as lead manager during Trump’s second impeachment trial, just weeks after the Jan. 6 insurrection. He recounted how on Jan. 6, 2021, he was at the Capitol, accompanied by one of his two daughters and a son-in-law, during a joint session of Congress to count the electoral votes from the presidential election when thousands of Trump supporters stormed the building in protest of Joe Biden’s victory.

He called the chaos and violence unleashed that day the culmination of a planned “series of assaults on the constitutional order,” from tweets by the former president urging his followers to converge on Washington, to a scant response from law enforcement, to a high-level plan to declare a failure of the electoral college, ratify the count in the House of Representatives, and declare martial law. 

Raskin said he believes a propaganda and disinformation campaign was built into the operation, and said recent efforts by conservative colleagues to revise and reinterpret Jan. 6, and categorize those convicted of their role in the attack as political “hostages” are offensive.

“What an extraordinary outrage and affront that is to the families, for example, of the remaining 136 hostages being held by Hamas right now, to call those people hostage who’ve had every element of due process respected after they violently assaulted federal officers, who were engaged in seditious insurrection and attempting to overthrow the government,” Raskin said.  

“I found it absolutely shocking that they would say that. It was an utterly Orwellian attempt to get people to forget what we saw with our own eyes.” 

The Jan. 6 attack came just a week after the Raskins lost their son, Thomas “Tommy” Bloom Raskin, a second-year student at Harvard Law School, at age 25. In the weeks and months following his death, the couple spoke openly about his battle with depression and began the Tommy Raskin Memorial Fund for People and Animals to honor his deep compassion for all living things. Raskin also wrote about the extraordinary confluence of events in his bestselling memoir Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy (HarperCollins, 2022), one of several books he has authored. 

‘When everything looks hopeless, you're the hope’

With violence and disinformation disrupting democratic processes and marring the last election, Abrams asked how the use of technology such as artificial intelligence by campaigns and outside actors might affect the next one. 

 “We now have deep fakes that are so real that I don't know that we will actually be able to know what's true or what's not true. So we’ve all been set up to start doubting what we see,” Abrams said.

“Do you think we’ll even be able to get to the point where we’re actually talking about ideas when it doesn’t seem like we, as a country, are even in agreement about what the truth is that we are debating? How do we think about a presidential election in that kind of a circumstance?”

“The whole point of law is to replace the rule of violence so that we have a nonviolent, principled system for mediating and adjudicating differences that we might have, right? And yet suddenly political violence has reassumed center stage,” Raskin replied, referring to a Trump lawyer’s argument before a federal appeals court on Jan. 9 that a president who has not been impeached by the House and convicted by the Senate cannot be prosecuted for ordering the murder of a political rival.

“That’s an extraordinary claim that really does elevate the president above the law, the assertion that the president can commit violence with impunity unless he's impeached and convicted,” he said. “It’s such an extreme argument.” 

But Raskin said he takes hope for the continuation of democracy from the young voters he encounters traveling around the country, and from politicians who speak out against extremists.

“When we were growing up, my dad used to say to us, ‘When everything looks hopeless, you're the hope.’ And I feel that really strongly, and I'm seeing the hope right here in this room,” Raskin said.  

“This is a great generation of young people who are beyond racism and sexism and homophobia and fascism and anti-Semitism. And I've been all over the country and I'm seeing more and more Constitutional patriots out there, like my friend Liz Cheney, like Adam Kinzinger, like Mitt Romney, like Chris Christie.

“People are saying, ‘This is a do or die moment for democracy in America,’ and all over the world people look to our country. Even with everything we've been through, we are still the world's greatest multiracial, multi-religious, multi-ethnic, multicultural, constitutional democracy where we're not defined by one race, one ethnicity, one language, one political party, one ideology. But we are defined by one Constitution. That is our treasured, binding instrument. 

“The young people in this room have the privilege and the responsibility to make it meaningful for everybody in your lives and everybody in your communities and for the country. We're depending on the young people. And we’ve got 14 or 15 million new voters in 2024.” 

While Raskin spoke candidly about his Democratic politics and progressive political philosophy, he also spoke of his friendships with colleagues holding opposing views, and urged students to engage with people whom they might consider ideological adversaries. 

“I'm a middle child, so I like hanging out with anybody, you know. I try to bring people together,” Raskin said. “Sometimes when I’m doing political speaking people say to me, ‘You know, your party does really good stuff, but you’re terrible at messaging.’ And I've come to realize that's kind of right. It's very hard to message when you're talking about pre-K education, and you're talking about defending Social Security, and you're talking about human rights abroad, and you're talking about the emoluments clause.  

“But I just think that a public philosophy that incorporates complexity and tolerance and diversity is ultimately going to be much stronger, and it will even be able to bring people over from the other side. And I'm seeing it happen every single day.

“I hope that my party can live up to the possibility of creating a huge tent that incorporates people with different points of view about policy questions, but fundamentally wants to stand up for liberal democracy in this century because it's in danger all over the world. Democracy is under siege wherever you look. So it’s important for us to maintain our humanity in this process and not give up on anybody.”