Tommy raskin cod12/10/2023 “My fear is that GOP leaders - having been totally whipped by Trump and the violent insurrectionists, and having effectively purged themselves of dissenters like Liz Cheney, John Katko, Richard Burr, and Bill Cassidy - would snap to attention and grant Trump’s wishes, rejecting enough Biden electors to activate a contingent election and get Trump elected ‘immediately’ in the House. “Assume (not hard to do) that Trump again cries fraud and asserts that Biden electors should be ‘returned’ to their state legislatures and the contest thrown into a contingent House election,” Raskin writes. With Trump still firmly atop the GOP and trading Big Lie loyalty for endorsements, Raskin warns that the next presidential election could be overturned even without another violent insurrection. “The perpetrators of these Big Lies know that human memory is a fragile instrument and that what we ‘remember’ of an event can easily be influenced by what others tell us to believe about it or by the constant repetition of lies about it,” he writes. Raskin compares the Big Lie to the Covid deniers and propagators of the Lost Cause myth. 6, Raskin cautions that the GOP’s decision to choose its “raw power” over the Constitution has undermined our collective memory of the insurrection and threatened democracy at large. Mitch McConnell, on the other hand, was “tearing up,” and “could lose it.” Trump was ultimately acquitted by a vote of 57 to 43, 10 votes short of the two-thirds majority needed to convict, with McConnell voting to acquit.Ī year after Jan. Rand Paul “seemed not to be watching at all,” Raskin writes. Indeed, while being shown footage of the violence for the very first time, Sen. 6 had created a powerful enough shock to rouse enough GOP senators, whom he likens to “religious cultists asleep in the back of a repainted school bus,” into convicting Trump. Amidst “two impossible traumas,” Raskin writes, that work became a “salvation and sustenance.” While Tommy’s suicide and the insurrection were “cosmically distinct and independent events,” Raskin writes, “I will probably spend the rest of my life trying to disentangle and understand them to restore coherence to the world they ravaged.” In Unthinkable, published this month by Harper Collins, Raskin sifts through grief and guilt, recounting the first 50 days of 2021, when he led the second impeachment trial of former President Donald Trump. Raskin recalls watching Democratic members of Congress crawl to the Republican side of the House floor because they guessed a mass shooter would be less likely to fire at that side of the room. Raskin and other members of Congress narrowly avoided the insurrectionists as they were scuttled from room to room. His daughter and son-in-law hid from the mob inside House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer’s office. Less than a week later, Raskin and members of his family were trapped inside the U.S. My boy, my dear boy.’ ” Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy by Jamie Raskin was published Jan. I have lost my Tommy, I have lost my son. “Rocking back and forth sobbing,” Raskin writes, “all I could say was ‘My boy, my dear Tommy. Look after each other, the animals, and the global poor for me. His suicide note read in part: “My illness won today. He had just finished his third semester at Harvard Law School and was living at home with the family in Takoma Park, Md. 31, 2020, his brilliant and empathetic son, Tommy, died by suicide at age 25 after a long struggle with depression. Congressman Jamie Raskin’s new memoir is about surviving the end of his world, and a warning about preventing the end of ours.
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