“He began to pen these extraordinary essays and articles that now add up to well over 100 as well as write plays and extremely long polemical poems, which he eagerly performed for audiences astounded by his precocious moral vision, utter authenticity of emotion, and beauty of expression,” the Raskins wrote. The Raskins described the joy they felt as parents as they watched their son, a second-year student at Harvard Law School and a graduate of Amherst College, “follow his own piercing moral and intellectual insights looking for answers to problems of injustice, poverty and war.” “He hated cliques and social snobbery, never had a negative word for anyone but tyrants and despots, and opposed all malicious gossip, stopping all such gossipers with a trademark Tommy line - ‘forgive me, but it’s hard to be a human.’ “
We invite you to join the discussion on Facebook and Twitter.In their essay Monday, the Raskins detailed Tommy Raskin’s lifelong penchant for helping others, describing him as a “daring outspoken defender of all outcasts and kids in trouble” who “always made time for the loneliest kids in class” at every stage of life.ĭuring his high school prom, the Raskins wrote, Tommy Raskin “threw a dinner party for 24 fellow students, including classmates who had no date that evening, and they all went to prom together as a group.” The Hill has removed its comment section, as there are many other forums for readers to participate in the conversation. That House panel is now seeking records for a number of people in Trump’s orbit, including his family members, close associates and even Republican members of Congress who participated in Trump’s “Stop the Steal” rally that led to the violent march on the Capitol. In July, Pelosi appointed Raskin to a bipartisan special committee charged with investigating the Jan. Raskin’s efforts to probe the events of Jan. “Not only will readers come to learn what he and his family went through after facing the unimaginable, but the powers of his famously lucid constitutional mind will help readers understand exactly what happened on the floor and off the floor on January 6 - and during the planning and managing of the case against the president during the second impeachment.” “Congressman Raskin’s memoir speaks to the tenacity of the human spirit through devastation and trauma,” said Lisa Sharkey, a HarperCollins executive who acquired the book. A former constitutional law professor at American University, he is often Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Democrats’ go-to guy for complex legal and ethics questions.īut during the impeachment trial, it was Raskin’s ability to weave his personal grief over his son’s sudden death with Trump’s push to overturn the election and overthrow democracy that captivated Washington and the nation. In just a few short years in Congress, Raskin has emerged as one of the most well-respected legal scholars in Washington. “This book is a labor of love written to capture the dazzling life of a brilliant young man in crisis, who we lost forever, and the struggle to defend a beautiful nation in crisis, a democracy that we still have the chance to save.” Capitol incited by Donald Trump and calculated to overthrow the 2020 presidential election,” Raskin said in a statement Wednesday. “I wrote UNTHINKABLE as a way to make sense of two traumatic events in my life, the shattering loss of our son Tommy to depression on the last day of 2020 and, one week later, the bloody Januinsurrection at the U.S.
4, just two days before the first anniversary of the Capitol insurrection.
It will be published by Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers, on Jan. 6, surviving the deadly Capitol insurrection with his daughter and son-in-law, drafting two articles of impeachment against former President Trump for his role in the riot and leading the Democrats’ ultimately unsuccessful prosecution of the 45th president in his second Senate impeachment trial.
In “Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy,” Raskin opens up about losing his 25-year-old son Tommy to suicide on New Year’s Eve, defending the results of the 2020 election on the House floor on Jan. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) is writing a memoir about the tragic and historic first 45 days of 2021 that forever altered the lives of him and his family members.