And it was hardly less shattering for the army of admirers Raskin, whom I first met in 2019 when I interviewed him for a documentary film, had amassed through three decades of teaching, organizing, campaigning, legislating, and handing out his business card, the one with his personal email address on it, to any constituent who approached him. Tommy’s death was shattering for Jamie and wife Sarah and their two daughters, Hannah and Tabitha. He and his team of managers are widely considered to have presented a masterful case against Trump and defense of the rule of law, and indeed, even though the Senate did not convict Trump, the vote was the most bipartisan Senate support for conviction in the country’s history.Īll that unfolded just weeks after the suicide of his only son, Thomas Bloom Raskin, whose lifeless body Jamie discovered in their home on the last morning of 2020. But those performances were mere prelude to the second impeachment, over the January 6 insurrection, when Speaker Nancy Pelosi put Raskin in charge. So many members’ questions during main-event hearings are really ill-disguised speeches, delivered for editing and dropping into campaign ads with Raskin, you could tell he was actually going somewhere. It was clear then-this was late 2019-that the guy had some chops. As a member of the Judiciary Committee, he questioned Robert Mueller later, during the first Trump impeachment, the Ukraine one, his arguments about the Founders’ rationales for impeachment reflected his history as a constitutional law professor and scholar. But the modern Congress makes a bit more room for talent to rise to the top, and so Raskin rather quickly became a star. Yes, he’s “just” a congressman, serving only his third term in days gone by, when the Old Bulls laid their mighty girths across the House of Representatives, a third-termer like Raskin would still be an unknown, being told (probably by some segregationist) to wait his turn.
Dr jeffrey raskin trial#
On February 12, during the Senate impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump, Raskin and Representative David Cicilline, a Democrat from Rhode Island, depart the U.S.
But if the latter, history may well note that no one-save, obviously, Joe Biden and his campaign team-did more to secure that end than Jamie Raskin. Whether Act V ends with Trump victorious, the republic in ruins around him, or with Trump vanquished and the republic saved and vindicated, remains to be seen. But then, we’re only (alas) in Act III of the Trump tragedy. political history, has not been forced to drink from it.
Dr jeffrey raskin series#
The soliloquy showcases not just Macbeth’s malevolence, but his awareness that he may be setting off a series of events that he will not be able to control: “we but teach bloody instructions which, being taught, return to plague the inventor.” It is from this speech that we get the phrase “poisoned chalice,” from which the instigator of dark events will himself one day be forced to drink.ĭonald Trump, who has poisoned our republic’s chalice arguably more thoroughly than any other figure in U.S. The line opens Macbeth’s soliloquy toward the end of Act I, as he contemplates murdering King Duncan. Lincoln was obsessed with Macbeth, and so was John Wilkes Booth, who had played Macbeth.” Contemplation of Macbeth led him to settle on his more considered answer: “I’ve thought a number of times of ‘If it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly.’” Then he gave the matter more serious thought.
“I mean, um … ‘Hell is empty and all the devils are here’?” He smiled cheekily at the line, spoken by Ariel in The Tempest, referring to sailors jumping off a burning ship no elaboration was needed in either of our minds about who these “devils” of today might be. He squinted his eyes and looked downward.
Two days later, I asked him for a quote from the Bard that sums up our times.
But he loves his Shakespeare, he told me one October night as we sat in his kitchen. He is not, he admits, a big reader of fiction doesn’t have the time. Most every night, just after he slips into bed, Jamie Raskin picks up a volume of the collected works of Shakespeare, thumbs through it, and reads a few pages before sleep takes him.
0 kommentar(er)
