On the final day of 2020, a star-crossed year racked by COVID-19 and rancor, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., suffered the greatest loss any parent can suffer.
After years of struggling with mental illness, his 25-year-old son, Tommy, took his own life at the family’s home in Takoma Park.
Recently, before 160 people at the Lewes Public Library, Raskin talked about his book, “Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth and the Trials of American Democracy,” which tells how he led Donald Trump’s impeachment trial, even as he grieved for his son.
Tommy, a Harvard law student, left this note for his family: “Please forgive me. My illness won today. Please look after each other, the animals, and the global poor for me. All my love, Tommy.”
Six days later, his son’s suicide would become, for Raskin, forever intertwined with the nation’s struggle to preserve its democracy. On Jan. 6, 2021, goaded by the president, a violent mob attacked the nation’s Capitol, hoping to halt the peaceful transfer of power following Trump’s loss to Joe Biden.
On Jan. 5, the family had buried Tommy in Montgomery County, Maryland. Rep. Raskin’s daughter urged him to stay home the next day.
He told her duty called. His duty was to the Constitution. It called on Congress to certify the votes of the Electoral College.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., had also called. She knew the Republicans would lodge an avalanche of objections to the results from the Electoral College. Weeks before, Pelosi had asked him to take the lead in answering those objections. He had agreed.
Raskin expected protracted debate. He did not expect violence. Before Jan. 6, America remained the country of his boyhood.
In that country, so enveloped in American exceptionalism, he believed that “fascism could never happen. … We could never see mobs attacking the government. America was different.”
His view of American exceptionalism has changed. It’s now rooted not in some abstract or mystical sense but in the people themselves.
“I believe what is exceptional about America is an incredibly, deeply rooted passion that our people have for democratic self-government,” Raskin said.
That belief is now being tested.
Before the American Revolution, Raskin said, power flowed downward from kings and queens. America “upended” that theory of government. The Founding Fathers proclaimed that power derived from “We the People.”
Now, it’s American democracy that is in danger of being upended. When the mob attacked the Capitol, Raskin said, “We came extremely close to losing it all.”
To help Americans understand the danger, the Jan. 6 committee will present its case this month in a series of eight public hearings. Raskin said the committee will look at the “escalating steps” Trump and his supporters took to overturn the election.
After that, ultimately, it will be up to we, the people.
Tommy was named in honor of one of Raskin’s heroes, Thomas Paine, whose tract “Common Sense” helped persuade Americans the time had come for independence.
Raskin likes to quote a line from Paine: “The times have found us.” In 1776, that meant the time was ripe for revolution. In 2022, it means the time has come to reaffirm our belief in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
Paine wrote another haunting line, which may help explain our present troubles: “What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.”
Like many of the present generation, my democratic freedoms came virtually cost-free. I have voted. I have participated, in small ways, in our great 246-year experiment with democracy.
But I have not been called, in a meaningful way, to ask what I can do for my country, as President John Kennedy called upon an earlier generation. Perhaps this is why we seem to value our democracy so lightly.
But just as “the times” found our Founding Fathers, so they have found all of us.
We must relearn to value and protect the democracy our generation has obtained so cheaply. We must preserve and pass on to the next generation what the previous 10 generations have passed on to us.
We can do this if we arm ourselves with knowledge, follow the hearings closely and allow ourselves to be guided, as our revolutionary forbears were guided, by common sense.
One final thought from Paine: In 1776, he wrote, “The cause of America is, in a great measure, the cause of all mankind.”
Eighty-seven years later, that was still true, when Lincoln spoke for the ages on the battlefields of Gettysburg.
It remains true today. The question is, will this generation accept that challenge?
Don Flood is a former newspaper editor who lives in Lewes.
