In the half glow of early evening, on a tree-lined suburban street, a crush of supporters engulfs Jamie Raskin.

“Welcome to New Jersey!” someone says. “Thank you for doing what you do. I’m so honored to shake the hand of the man who impeached Donald Trump.”

Raskin works the crowd: a quip here, a handshake there, selfies all around. He’s wearing a dark pinstriped suit, a burgundy-­and-blue tie, and a pair of scuffed tan oxfords. His look is less polished than professorial, a holdover from his days as a constitutional-law professor at American University—before he became a Democratic congressman representing Maryland’s 8th District, and a liberal darling for his fight against Trumpism.

“You always say the things we would like to say,” someone else tells him. “I’m a total fangirl. Are these people as crazy as they seem?”

These people, in this case, refers to leaders of the MAGA movement in the House of Representatives. Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene, Raskin confesses, more than lives up to her reputation among Democrats. “But I have to admit,” he adds, “I have a soft spot” for Colorado Republican Lauren Boebert. Recently, during an oversight hearing, Greene asked if Texas Democrat Jasmine Crockett’s fake eyelashes were affecting her reading comprehension, an insult that set off a lengthy, heated exchange among lawmakers. After Greene’s initial jab was stricken from the record, Raskin explains, Boebert voted with Democrats against allowing Greene to continue speaking.

It’s late May, and Raskin, 61, has come to Westfield, New Jersey, to support Sue Altman, a first-time congressional candidate running in a swing district. He makes his way to the backyard patio of a private home where 150 or so local Democrats—not unlike his constituents in his hometown of Takoma Park—have gathered to hear him speak.

“I tell my friends across the aisle, when we get through this period, when we beat Trump—and we will—when we beat Trumpism, they will be fit only for selling flowers and incense at Dulles Airport,” Raskin says, standing on a section of porch framed by columns. “Because they are acting like members of a religious cult. And still, we reach out to them.”

Democrats (and a few disaffected Republicans) have painted the November presidential election not as a contest about competing policy preferences or political philosophies but as a referendum on democracy itself. No one has been better positioned to make that case than Raskin. He was at the Capitol on January 6 with his daughter, Tabitha, and his son-in-law, Hank, when the mob breached security and attempted to prevent the peaceful transfer of power from Trump to Joe Biden. Raskin feared for the lives of his family, and for his own. In the aftermath, he served as lead manager for Trump’s impeachment over inciting an insurrection, and he later played a key role on the House committee that investigated the attacks and referred the former President to the Justice Department for criminal charges.

As the nation reeled, so did Raskin. His son, Tommy, had taken his own life a week before the Capitol attack. Raskin’s private grief and suffering coincided with the country’s, and his devotion to duty in a period of darkness helped elevate him to national prominence.

In recent months, as Trump has displayed his own brand of political resilience, evading accountability and promising retribution in his campaign to retake the White House, Raskin has become one of his most outspoken adversaries. He’s a regular on cable news, reminding viewers of Trump’s role in January 6 and criticizing the Supreme Court for “elevating the former President into royal status by nullifying criminal liability.” He’s taken his message on the road, knocking on doors for fellow candidates and traveling coast to coast to bolster Democrats and make the case against the Republican nominee. The upcoming election, Raskin says, will “set the direction for American politics for the rest of the century”—either precipitating “a lurch into destabilizing authoritarian right-wing politics of an unvarnished nature” or enabling the country “to put Trumpism behind us and to strengthen democracy and freedom for everybody.”

In Westfield, after he finishes speaking, Raskin ducks into a nearby driveway for a CNN interview. When he returns, he hands Altman a check for her campaign. The wine flows. Raskin mingles with guests, discussing Pennsylvania’s importance on the Electoral College map. The mood is hopeful, the political chaos of the coming summer as yet unimaginable.

“This is my historical assignment,” Raskin says. “And I’m not going anywhere.”

When I first meet Raskin in early May, at his office in the Rayburn House Office Building, he can’t help but reflect on the past. “I do probably think too much about the impeachment trial,” he says, “because if we had gotten ten more Republicans to vote with us, we would not be in this situation. I do hold Mitch McConnell accountable for that.”

A week after January 6, then-speaker Nancy Pelosi asked Raskin to lead the impeachment effort against Trump. Still undone by grief and the violence at the Capitol, Raskin said yes. Knowing the emotional gravity of the decision, Pelosi asked him to check with his family. The assignment came with risk. Capitol and Takoma Park police both stationed officers at Raskin’s home. His staff fielded an endless stream of calls, “some of the most vile, anti-Semitic things you’ve ever heard,” says Julie Tagen, his former chief of staff. The messages tended to arrive in waves—usually after Fox News featured him, she recalls.

Raskin mounted a case rooted in the Constitution, but also one that asked the Senate to set aside its political and ideological differences for something larger. “Is this America?” he asked. “This trial in the final analysis is not about Donald Trump. The country and the world know who Donald Trump is. This trial is about who we are. We’ve got a chance here, with the truth.” He cited then–Wyoming Republican representative Liz Cheney, who called the insurrection “the greatest betrayal of the presidential oath of office in the history of our country.” And he quoted Thomas Paine, the namesake of his son, Tommy: “Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered. But we have this saving consolation: the more difficult the struggle, the more glorious, in the end, will be our victory.”

It was, Pelosi says, “a masterful performance.” By a 57–43 vote, the Senate found Trump guilty—a significant margin, but ten votes shy of the two-thirds majority necessary for a conviction. Seven Republicans voted in favor. McConnell did not. He was swayed by the evidence, telling the Senate that Trump was “practically and morally responsible” for January 6. But he also argued that the Senate had no authority to impeach a former President, even though a motion to dismiss the case over that objection had been voted down during the trial.

Sitting with me in his office, Raskin still smarts over McConnell’s failure to whip the votes based on that rejected claim. “The greatest case of jury nullification in American history,” he says.

“You see,” he continues, “I’m still a little bit too caught up in it.”

Raskin also faults the Supreme Court for its March ruling in Trump v. Anderson, which prevented Colorado from removing the former President from the ballot on 14th Amendment grounds for his role in inciting January 6. “The language [of the amendment] is perfectly clear,” Raskin says. “If you swore an oath to support the Constitution, and you betray it by engaging in an insurrection or rebellion, you can never hold office again. The court, I think, just abandoned the rule of law.

“Nobody wants to take responsibility for confronting Trump,” he continues. “It didn’t happen in the Senate, it didn’t happen in the Supreme Court. So it’s going to be up to the people to reject the politics of corruption, insurrection, and authoritarianism.”

Raskin’s progressive streak was there from the start. He was just five when his father, Marcus—a Juilliard-trained pianist turned antiwar activist who founded the Institute for Policy Studies in DC—was indicted in 1968 for conspiring to aid and abet draft evasion, as part of the infamous Boston Five trial. (Marcus was acquitted, and his fellow defendants’ convictions were later overturned.) “It’s really my first set of memories,” Raskin says. “So I became very interested at a very young age in law and the Constitution and the courts.”

Raskin enrolled at Harvard when he was 16 and joined student groups pressuring the school to divest holdings in firms doing business with apartheid South Africa. In 1985, he was arrested during a protest at the South African Embassy in DC. He edited the Harvard Law Review before teaching at AU’s Washington College of Law, where he was associate dean of faculty and academic affairs. Along the way, Raskin represented Ross Perot when he was excluded from the 1996 presidential debates; wrote a book, Overruling Democracy, criticizing the controversial Supreme Court decision that decided the 2000 election for George W. Bush; and was an early advocate of automatic voter registration and the popular vote for presidential elections. But he appeared destined for a life beyond academia, recalls former AU law-school dean Claudio Grossman. “You are a politician,” he remembers telling Raskin. “You can do much more in your life.”

Raskin made that leap in 2006, upsetting a longtime incumbent to join the Maryland State Senate. “It was a movement,” David Moon, his campaign chairman, says of the race. “You could feel it. All the kids wanted to volunteer for his campaign. . . . [They were] hitting thousands of doors for him at a time.” Once in office, he helped pass legislation legalizing medical marijuana, abolishing the death penalty, and establishing marriage equality. “He spent two years working on me,” James Brochin, a conservative Democrat, said at the time, describing Raskin’s relentless campaigning that finally won him over on marriage equality. “He’s got an incredible amount of decency.”

When Chris Van Hollen vacated his US House seat in 2015 to run for the Senate, Raskin prevailed in what became the most expensive primary in congressional history: He raised $1.8 million, while opponents Kathleen Matthews and David Trone outspent him 9 to 1. On election night, the mood was jubilant when Raskin’s race was called. He imagined tackling climate change and income inequality.

Then the presidential election was called.

From the start, they were destined to tangle: Raskin, with his background in constitutional law, and Trump, with his disregard for political norms. Citing Russian cyber-sabotage and voter suppression, Raskin immediately questioned the legitimacy of Trump’s victory. In 2017, he sponsored a bill to establish a commission tasked with determining whether a President was unfit mentally or physically to perform his duties—possibly supporting Trump’s removal from office under the 25th Amendment.

After Trump’s second impeachment, Raskin served on the January 6 Committee, which investigated the attacks and ultimately referred the former President to the Justice Department for prosecution on four criminal charges. In August 2023, the DOJ indicted Trump, but a subsequent Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity has helped tie up that case in court. In hindsight, Raskin regrets not pushing harder on impeachment over the Constitution’s Foreign Emoluments Clause, which Trump appeared to violate when he failed to divest his business holdings, allowing foreign governments to rent space in Trump Tow-er, for instance. “It was a money­making operation from day one,” Raskin says of Trump’s presidency.

Following Biden’s 2020 victory, Raskin felt relief. That soon gave way to a growing unease. He saw how Trump—despite everything, or perhaps because of it—was strengthening his hold over the GOP. He saw where things were headed.

There’s an irrepressible wit to Raskin, a mischievous gleam that accompanies his politics. As lead Democrat on the House oversight committee, Raskin has defended Biden during Republican investigations into his and Hunter Biden’s business dealings, and he recently appeared on Fox News alongside the committee’s chair, James Comer. When Comer admitted that the investigations had stopped short of a formal impeachment, Raskin teasingly congratulated his colleague across the aisle: “I think Chairman Comer did a magnificent job exonerating Joe Biden of all the fraudulent charges that were raised against him in this Congress.”

Raskin’s close friends say he’s even more playful in private. He loves games, especially Boggle and chess. (He used to square off against the chess hustlers in Dupont Circle.) He tells ghost stories, enjoys flag football, and, like his father, plays the piano. “He’s ferociously serious, and then it’s like, ‘Here’s a card trick,’ ” says Virginia Democrat Abigail Spanberger. She describes Raskin as a kind of “connective tissue” among congressional Democrats. “Jamie is the one person who can float among the people who hate a bill and the people who love it,” she says. “And where he can bridge the divides of understanding, he does.”

“I consider myself a pretty lighthearted person,” Raskin says. “The desire to bounce back from tragedy and hardship to get to a place of laughter and good humor again—that’s a pretty strong impulse for me. . . . I don’t think I deal very well with hardship and difficulty. Until I started getting cancer myself, I was a terrible friend to my friends who had cancer.”

In 2009, Raskin was diagnosed with Stage III colon cancer. After undergoing chemotherapy, he would show up in the Maryland State Senate wearing infusion belts, to continue his treatments for 48 hours. The fight for marriage equality was then ongoing, and one of Raskin’s colleagues from Baltimore County suggested he was using his illness to win votes—something Raskin acknowledges was probably true.

“I learned something about the difference between misfortune and injustice,” he says. “Stage III colon cancer is a misfortune: It can happen to anyone.” But a cancer diagnosis without health insurance, he says: That’s an injustice. “And that should be the role of people in public life: to remove injustices.”

In December 2022, Raskin received another cancer diagnosis, this time lymphoma. He wore bandannas in the House to hide his hair loss during chemo, receiving one as a gift from guitarist and Sopranos actor Steven Van Zandt. His illness influenced his decision not to run for the Maryland Senate seat vacated by Ben Cardin. Instead, Raskin has been campaigning for Democratic candidate Angela Alsobrooks in her race against former governor Larry Hogan. In May, he celebrated the one-year anniversary of his remission. “He really is the most resilient person I’ve ever met,” says Tagen. “There’s something in his constitution that just says, I’m not going to let this overwhelm me and rule me.”

Raskin dips into Shakespeare many nights, and he notes that the Bard’s plays are divided into three categories: comedies, tragedies, and histories. “A lot of my life, I’ve lived in a comedy,” he says. “I’ve had to learn to think about tragedy, too.”

On the last night of Tommy Raskin’s life, he played Boggle and watched Family Guy with his father in the family’s Takoma Park home. They hugged goodnight. Love you, dear boy.

The next morning, the very last day of 2020, Raskin discovered his son’s body.

Tagen remembers arriving at the scene and thinking Raskin was on the verge of a heart attack. Father and son were best friends, intellectual soulmates and sparring partners. Tommy had been there from the start of Raskin’s political career, knocking on doors and debating the finer points of political philosophy and strategy. Unlike his father, he had no appetite for politics itself; like his grandfather, he was more of an intellectual. Tommy had embraced effective altruism, which considers the question of how to use one’s resources to help the greatest number of people. He was so keenly attuned to injustice and suffering that he never got a driver’s license—he couldn’t entertain the possibility of injuring or killing someone while behind the wheel. He had long battled depression.

Now, suddenly, Tommy was gone. Raskin had agreed to lead the impeachment, but maybe that was all he could muster. Maybe his political career was over. Let them have it, he thought of the Covid and Holocaust and climate-change deniers, of the pro-fascist forces working to control the government. Then he remembered his family and his constituents and his dear boy, who would have been “wrecked” by the events of January 6. How could he not push on?

“I was awestruck by his resolve and his capacity to take his pain and channel it into his defense of the Republic,” recalls Julia Sweig, a close family friend. “His capacity to resist thoughtfully with humor, with love, I think that’s Tommy coursing through his veins and in his mind and heart at all times.”

I asked Raskin how, more than three years later, he has come to terms with the loss of his son. “I miss Tommy sharply and deeply all the time,” he said. “I think about him every day, of course.”

Raskin choked up. For a moment, we sat in silence. Then Raskin recited Tommy’s suicide note from memory: Please forgive me. My illness won today. Look after each other, the animals, and the global poor for me. All my love, Tommy.

“We’ve been in a struggle against a lot of darkness and a lot of violence and a lot of cruelty,” Raskin said. “And those have been words to live by.”

On a Sunday afternoon in June, I meet Raskin at the Taste of Wheaton. Vendors line a handful of streets blocked off from traffic. Vanilla Ice blares over speakers, the smell of kebabs wafts in the air. For all the glamour of TV appearances, life as an elected official also includes mundane realities—helping constituents with Social Security payments, federal pensions, passport applications. Raskin always carries a stack of business cards with him. He hands them out like sticks of gum.

A few days earlier, Trump had become the first former President to be convicted of felony crimes when a New York jury found him guilty of 34 charges in a 2016 election-interference scheme involving hush-money payments to porn actress Stormy Daniels. “It didn’t feel like the end,” Raskin says of the verdict, before hopping into a car to attend another event. “But it felt like the beginning of the end.”

By the time we meet again—at Takoma Park’s annual Independence Day parade—it’s the Democrats who appear finished. A week earlier, Biden’s muffled and confused performance in his debate against Trump opened a rift within Raskin’s party. Some wanted the 81-year-old to withdraw from the race. Others wanted him to fight on.

The morning is sweltering. Marching in a suit, Raskin uses a campaign T-shirt as a sweat rag. At the end of the route, a local TV reporter presses him about where he stands. “The great thing about the Democratic Party is that we have freedom of speech and expression,” he replies. “And you know, unlike the Republican Party, which operates like a cult of authoritarian personality right now, we are a party of democracy and diversity, and different people express themselves. I have great faith in Biden, who won the nomination, to do the right thing.”

Meaning to drop out? “It’s really not up to me,” Raskin says.

That weekend, Raskin wrote Biden a letter, urging him to consult with fellow party members as he weighed his political future. It concluded with the cautionary tale of former Boston Red Sox ace Pedro Martínez, who in the 2003 Major League Baseball playoffs had lobbied to keep pitching despite a tired arm, enabling the New York Yankees to mount a game-seven comeback.

The letter was leaked to the press shortly before Biden—who later cited Democratic lawmakers’ concerns that he would hurt them in down-ballot contests—ended his reelection bid. A race that had seemed all but over was instantly transformed, with Vice President Kamala Harris’s rise as the presumptive nominee giving Democrats something essential: hope. Watching it all unfold, I remembered what Altman, the New Jersey congressional candidate, had said about Raskin at the fundraiser in May: “He holds us all accountable to the ideals of our party. I have no doubt that if he felt that something wasn’t going right, he would say something. And so I think of him as a real role model for the type of congressperson I hope to be.”

The road to November promises to be unpredictable, and bruising. “The fight of our lives,” Raskin calls it. Even if Harris prevails and Democrats retake the House, there’s no guarantee that Trumpism, in all its norm-upending permutations, will be defeated. Which is why Raskin plans to push for sweeping, democracy-strengthening reforms focused on gerrymandering and voter suppression. “But all of these things are for naught if the John Roberts court just strikes everything down,” he says. That’s why he’d also like to see term limits for judges, a stricter code of ethics, and expansion of the court from nine to 13 justices—matching the number of federal circuit courts. “I feel like this election will be the definitive American statement on authoritarianism,” Raskin says. “Or at least I hope so.”

If Trump wins, Raskin’s role on the oversight committee will put him at the heart of future battles—for example, over the plans and ideas in Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s controversial, 900-page conservative-governance road map that calls for replacing thousands of federal civil servants with Trump loyalists and expanding the President’s powers. (Trump has tried to distance himself from Project 2025, even though some of it mirrors his campaign’s proposals and much of it was written by alums of his White House.) “[It] reads like a recipe for creating abuse of power and corruption across the government,” Raskin says.

Some friends wonder if he’s pushing too hard. In recent months, Raskin has spoken to the Lone Star Democrats project in Dallas, given the keynote speech at the New Hampshire Democratic state convention, and helped Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer kick off a bus tour. “He’s relentless,” Claudio Grossman says. “He has something inside of him. I worry about his health.”

Privately, says Sweig, Raskin “carries the worries and concerns we see publicly with him all the time.”

Raskin says he’ll step aside eventually, like Biden: “I’d be happy to end up doing some other stuff in my life before it’s all over. I love the idea of teaching again. I love the idea of writing. I love the idea of doing some music.”

But not yet. In Raskin’s office in the Rayburn building hangs a framed picture of his parents from Life magazine. They’re listening to Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech on the National Mall, feet soaking in the Reflecting Pool, heeding King’s call that “now is the time to make real the promises of democracy.” On a dresser in Raskin’s bedroom sits his son’s suicide note, a constant reminder of his sacred oath. “I feel like the struggle that we’re in right now to defend democratic practices and the progress of freedom and self-government is still so much part of the pledge I made after we lost Tommy,” he says.

There’s no telling what lies ahead, but Raskin knows this much: The worst will forever be behind him.

Editor’s note: For greater clarity, a reference in an earlier version of this article reading “Republican investigations into [Joe] and Hunter Biden’s business dealings” has been updated to read “Republican investigations into alleged connections between the president and Hunter Biden’s business dealings.”

This article appears in the September 2024 issue of Washingtonian.