Photograph: Joseph Prezioso/AFP/Getty Images He is occupying my heart … He is showing me the way to some kind of safety … My wound has now become my shield of defense and my path to escape, and all I can think of is my son propelling me forward to fight.” Trump supporters clash with police on 6 January 2021. More chillingly, he reports the decision of some Democrats to cross their chamber after Congress was invaded, “because they thought a mass shooter who entered would be less likely to aim at the Republican side of the House”.īut Raskin was never afraid: “The very worst thing that could ever have happened to us has already happened … and Tommy is with me somehow every step of the way. He realizes these “fascist bread crumbs throughout the city” should have activated “some kind of cultural alarm”. Driving to the Capitol, Raskin spotted Maga supporters heckling a young Black driver and a car with a bumper sticker reading: “If Guns Are Outlawed, How Am I Going To Shoot Liberals?” This is also a political memoir, of the Capitol attack and the second impeachment. His father described his illness as “a kind of relentless torture in the brain … Despite very fine doctors and a loving family … the pain became overwhelming and unyielding and unbearable at last.” Congressman Jamie Raskin: ‘I’ll never forget the terrible sound of them trying to barrel into the chamber’ Like so many others with clinical depression, the catastrophe deepened his symptoms. Tommy was a second-year student at Harvard Law School when Covid began. In the state legislature, Raskin helped outlaw the death penalty and legalize same-sex marriage. Jamie Raskin taught constitutional law then ran for the Maryland senate, with Tommy, then 10, his first campaign aide. When Raskin was the only one acquitted, he famously demanded a retrial. In 1968, Marcus Raskin was indicted with William Sloane Coffin, Dr Benjamin Spock and others for conspiracy to aid resistance to the draft. His grandfather, Marcus Raskin, was one of the earliest opponents of the Vietnam war when he worked in the Kennedy White House. His maternal great-grandfather was the first Jew elected to the Minnesota legislature. Tommy Raskin was the fourth generation in a great liberal family. Raskin’s astonishing story of tragedy and redemption, of “despair and survival”, depended entirely on all the “good and compassionate people” like Tommy, “the non-narcissists, the feisty, life-size human beings who hate bullying and fascism naturally – people just the right size for a democracy … where we are all created equal”.
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