Featured Speaker Rep. Jamie Raskin Won't Back Down

By Dennis Harrod

Rep. Jamie Raskin is no stranger to adversity. In addition to being a target of MAGA ire, the Democrat from Maryland has suffered personal tragedy as well. Yet he keeps fighting for what he thinks is right. While his opponents stick him with various labels (“stupid”, “a-hole”, “traitor” “Marxist”, to quote some of the nicer comments from a recent Facebook posting), he defines himself more broadly.

“Whenever anyone calls me a liberal, I say ‘You’re damn right,’ because at the heart of that word is ‘liberty,’” Raskin is quoted as saying in the book Shameless, by Brian Tyler Cohen. “And I’m a progressive, because at the heart of that word is ‘progress.’ And these days, I’m very happy to call myself a conservative, because … I want to conserve the land, air, water, the climate system, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Clean Air Act, the Social Security Act, the Medicare Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, you name it.”

Raskin, who was sworn into his fifth term as a representative of Maryland’s 8th Congressional District in January 2025, will be appearing in Cazenovia Oct. 17, along with John Mannion who represents New York’s 22nd Congressional District. The event is sponsored by the Madison County Democratic Committee. Tickets are $25.

The two will talk about the upcoming midterm elections, the choices facing voters and why showing up and voting has never been more important.

Raskin’s experience with adversity goes far beyond political opposition. In late 2020, his son Tommy died by suicide after a long battle with depression and Raskin has written eloquently about that experience in his 2022 book Unthinkable. Tommy’s suicide came a week before the Jan. 6 attack on Congress and Raskin writes about the conflict and pain he and the country suffered in the aftermath. He went on to lead the impeachment effort to hold President Trump accountable for inciting the violence, which accounts in large part for the hatred felt for him by the president’s supporters.

Raskin hasn’t backed down and continues the fight against what he sees as a failure to govern on the part of President Trump and the Republican Party.

“The responsibility to govern has been replaced by the need to attack, to perform, to obstruct, to provoke,” he has said. “This reality is getting exponentially worse year after year – and as citizens, we are becoming dangerously numb to it.”

Overcoming that numbness is key to Raskin’s political mission. Organinzing and getting people to vote is in his blood. He is the founder and leader of Democracy Summer, the Democrats’ nationwide program that has engaged thousands of young people in training for political activism.

In 2006, he ran for the Maryland State Senate and defeated a 32-year incumbent by a 2-1 margin, telling voters, “It’s not my ambition to be in the political center, it’s my ambition to be in the moral center—and to bring the political center to us.”

It is this “moral stance” that has attracted many voters to his efforts. His cousin, Cazenovia Town Councilor Jimmy Golub, was instrumental in getting Raskin to come to Cazenovia. Golub says Raskin’s family has been politically involved almost from the beginning where Golub’s and Raskin’s great grandparents emigrated from Russia in the late nineteenth century. “As descendants of refugees that had to face political and cultural oppression, Raskin’s family has a long history of political activism, especially regarding refugees,” Golub said.

Prior to entering Congress, Raskin was a professor of constitutional law and the First Amendment for a quarter-century at American University’s Washington College of Law.

As a constitutional scholar, he sees the Constitution and democracy as evolving and moving forward, bit by bit. In his epilogue to the 2022 publication of The January 6th Report, he wrote that Abraham Lincoln’s “government of the people, by the people, for the people” remains a “tantalizing and elusive vision,” but that we as a country have moved toward a “more perfect union” through amendments to the original Constitution that have furthered the ideal of democracy by banning slavery, guaranteeing equal protection and due process, forbidding race discrimination in voting, enfranchising women’s right to vote and ending poll taxes, among others.

But we are in a time now, he says, where our rights are contracting. “Donald Trump’s Big Lies, Q-Anon conspiracy theories, Fox News disinformation, Putin’s propaganda – these are the interlocking enemies of truth and democratic freedom in America,” he writes in the epilogue.

He goes on to note that this is a difficult time for young people “who have little memory of any other political reality.”

As he has done since his first campaign for state senate back in 2006, he puts his faith in organizing and getting young people to become engaged and vote. He concludes his epilogue to the January 6th report by saying: “…tell (young people) about the great changes we have seen in our lives. Tell them that prior generations of patriots have faced dauting odds and crises in their own times. Those generations fought for democracy and freedom and they prevailed. So will we.”

The Madison County Democratic Committee’s Annual “Get Out the Vote” event featuring representatives Jamie Raskin and John Mannion will be October 17, 5-8:00 p.m., at the Wildcat Athletic Center,18 Liberty Street, Cazenovia. Tickets are $25 and can be purchased here: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/mcdcgotvevent26