WASHINGTON — Consultant Jamie Raskin started drafting the article of impeachment in opposition to President Trump inside hours of the violent mob a
WASHINGTON — Consultant Jamie Raskin started drafting the article of impeachment in opposition to President Trump inside hours of the violent mob assault on the Capitol.
“We don’t have a minute to spare,” he declared Wednesday on the Home flooring. “He’s a transparent and current hazard to the individuals.”
Mr. Raskin, 58, a former constitutional regulation professor at American College who additionally served as a state senator from Maryland, gained election to Congress in 2016 after an costly, hard-fought nine-way main in his closely Democratic district within the Washington suburbs. A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Regulation Faculty, he’s passionate in regards to the Structure and American historical past.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi has named him the lead impeachment supervisor, which suggests he would be the lead prosecutor in a Senate trial of Mr. Trump.
“We have to create a dynamic of motion by which all of our colleagues are compelled to confront their conscience in regards to the permission they’ve given the president to trample all the ideas and values of our Structure,” he mentioned in an interview this week.
In some ways, Mr. Raskin was made for this second; he has been engaged in progressive politics since he was a toddler, studying on the knee of his father, Marcus Raskin, a well known antiwar activist and liberal mental. However as he assumes the weighty function of lead prosecutor, he’s additionally dealing with a devastating household tragedy: the lack of his son, Tommy, 25 and a scholar at Harvard Regulation, to suicide on New 12 months’s Eve.
“Even on this darkest second, he has not in any approach diminished what he sees as his accountability as a member of Congress to defend our democracy,” mentioned Consultant David Cicilline, Democrat of Rhode Island and one in every of Mr. Raskin’s closest buddies within the Capitol. “None of us who know Jamie nicely are stunned by it.”
Effectively appreciated on either side of the political aisle, Mr. Raskin is a member of Ms. Pelosi’s unofficial “kitchen cupboard,” and serves on each the Home Judiciary Committee and the Home Guidelines Committee, the highly effective 13-member panel that units the phrases of debate within the Home.
Along with drafting the article of impeachment, he additionally wrote the decision, adopted by the Home on Tuesday evening, calling on Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Modification to strip Mr. Trump of his powers. He’s keen on quoting Thomas Paine, the Revolutionary Conflict determine for whom his son was named: “The occasions have discovered us.”