RASKIN SON CAUSE TRIAL

It was a moment where an opponent could stick in the dagger. Trump’s lawyers had just delivered what I recall was an incoherent stream-of-consciousness ramble. He was very elegant and very eloquent in his presentations. So we will yield back the remaining 28 minutes of our time.” It’s probably not the kind of thing I would have done, but it was very much the kind of thing that Tommy would have done.

RASKIN SON CAUSE TRIAL

We’ve been trying to conduct this trial in a bipartisan way and nothing is more bipartisan than the desire to recess. There’s nothing there.” So I just got up and I said, “There was a lot of partisan rhetoric on the other side. But I thought about Tommy and how he oftentimes in debate was very reserved and would be very much a gentleman, almost as if to say, “I don’t need to respond to that. So they closed, and I had to make a decision about whether to shoot down everything that they had said and expose all of the weaknesses and fallacies of their arguments. We had been preparing night and day for several weeks, and we had a sensational team of impeachment managers. They just had so little to work with, because the facts were overwhelmingly on our side, and the Constitution and the law were overwhelmingly on our side.

So I reserved the time and turned it over to Trump’s lawyers, who you may recall really did a terrible job, but I don’t know that it was completely their fault. One moment I remember specifically: We had delivered our opening statement at the beginning of the Senate impeachment trial, and we ended up with 28 minutes left over. Many of the things that I said resonated to me and were kind of Tommy-speak. Tommy was a really brilliant debater and debated when he was in high school. Can you give an example of a moment during the impeachment where you looked to Tommy for guidance? You write about how you channeled Tommy throughout the impeachment, which occurred just over a month after his passing. And one of them is a very profound poem called “Where War Begins.” It’s all about how the slaughter of animals conditions us to accept violence against human beings. He wrote several poems about being vegan and what it meant to him because everybody would ask, “why are you a vegan?” And then he would just get up and start delivering one of these poems. He converted more people to not eating meat than anybody I’ve ever met in my entire life. He was an anti-war activist, and he became a vegan and was a really strong animal rights person as well. He was very much a human rights activist. He was somebody that everybody wanted to be around, and he had profound moral and political passions. He was he was a musician, a playwright and a stand-up comic. So many of his classmates just described him as the life of the party. He was in his second year at Harvard Law School when we lost him. We just got back from Cambridge, actually, where Harvard Law School had a memorial service for him. He was just tremendously exuberantly funny. 6, but also because of the powerful and emotional story that you tell about Tommy, who you describe as your North Star. I found it spellbinding both because the events of Jan.

“Unthinkable ” reads like a love letter to your late son Tommy and a love letter to democracy. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity. Raskin tells his intensely personal and political story in his new book, “ Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy. Since the summer, Raskin has been a member of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6 Attack on the Capitol. Speaker Nancy Pelosi then tapped the grieving Raskin to be lead manager in Trump’s second impeachment trial. Capitol, egged on by the defeated president. That’s when Trump supporters mounted a violent insurrection in the U.S. Seven days later - and just a day after burying his son - Raskin returned to Congress to cast his vote to certify Biden’s election. On December 31, 2020, Raskin’s only son, Tommy, a promising young student at Harvard Law School, took his own life after a long struggle with depression. Raskin and his Democratic colleagues in Congress anticipated that former President Donald Trump would try to subvert the results and try to derail Congress’s normally pro-forma certification of President Joe Biden’s election.īut Raskin was blindsided. Jamie Raskin was expecting trouble after the November 2020 presidential election. Listen below, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts or Spotify to hear more. The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues with politicians, activists, artists, changemakers and citizens who are making a difference. Jamie Raskin, left, and his new book, “Unthinkable.” Images courtesy of Harper Collins

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