Representative raskin son death how to#
Representative raskin son death trial#

And that's the outer ring that included tens of thousands of people. a 'wild' protest by Donald Trump that turned into a riot. 6 is that there were three rings of activity. The way that I conceive of what happened on Jan. Or how are they going to be safe from violence? Or how do they get out of a war zone? And so before we think about, OK, how are we going to get people on trips to Mars and stuff like that? We've got to be thinking about people who are just struggling to survive, even at a subsistence level. He understood there are people who could focus on nothing other than where their next meal is coming from. Tommy never stopped looking at that level of the Maslow hierarchy of needs. Don't forget the animals and the global poor.'.

Representative raskin son death how to#

It's definitely the first thing I look at every morning, and for me, it's like 'how to' instructions for how to live. On why he and his wife keep Tommy's suicide note out so they see it every day was intensely isolating and demoralizing for a lot of young people and for someone who's struggling already with depression or some other kind of mental or emotional illness, it can become unbearable, and it did become unbearable in Tommy's case. And so these episodes of war and civil war and famine and hunger and violence, it struck him really hard. So he was an extraordinary empath and had this overwhelming sense of responsibility for the world. He felt these things like these people were members of our family. He would read an article in the newspaper about the civil war in Yemen and the hunger of children there, or about children who were displaced in Iraq, and it would stay with him the entire day and he would think about it, and then he would get in touch with groups that were working on it. He felt the pain of other people and of animals in a way that certainly I had never seen before, and people describe as unique. On his son Tommy's heightened sensitivity and empathyįrom a very young age, he was an enormously sensitive person. And suddenly I was just thrust into a world of complete tragedy and pain, and the madness of the insurrection and the attack on our system of government. I have a colleague, Abigail Spanberger from Virginia, who was once asked on C-SPAN, 'Who's the funniest member of Congress?' And it was my greatest achievement that she said, 'Oh, no question: Jamie Raskin.' And that's who I was. 6, I was the happiest, funniest member of Congress you could ever care to meet. This whole thing has been such an episode of cognitive dissonance for me, because people will tell you that before we lost Tommy, before Jan. It's all about the future of our country.' We're going to get to the answers and I'm going to report them this year to the American people, because the people deserve it. 'We don't spend all of our time in partisan polemics and food fights. 'I've never been on a more effective and serious bipartisan committee than select committee,' he says. 6 insurrection, the events leading up to it and the people behind it. Now Raskin is serving on the House select committee charged with investigating the Jan.

Representative raskin son death trial#

Trump's second impeachment trial ended in acquittal in February 2021. 'And so my feeling to the people who want to take down our democracy is that they're not going to scare me out of doing my job.' 'I personally felt no fear, because the very worst thing that ever could have happened to me had already happened to me,' he says. Raskin knew that leading the impeachment trial would likely result in death threats, but he pushed on. 'I was forced to galvanize all of my love for Tommy and my daughters, Hannah and Tabitha, and my wife, Sarah, and our family and our country, and to throw myself into the trial to make the case that Donald Trump had incited this violent insurrection in an effort to overthrow the 2020 presidential election,' Raskin says. Looking back now, Raskin sees Pelosi's request as a lifeline. Then House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., asked him to serve as the lead manager in the second impeachment trial of President Donald Trump. There was a time, he says, when 'I wasn't sure whether I was ever going to be able to do anything again.' In his new memoir, Unthinkable, Raskin reflects on his continuing efforts to understand those two traumatic events. Capitol with his daughter and son-in-law when a violent mob stormed the building in an attempt to overturn the results of the presidential election. 6, 2021, just a day after Tommy's funeral, Raskin was at work in the U.S. On New Year's Eve 2020, his son Tommy, 25, died by suicide after years of fighting mental illness. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., experienced two unimaginable traumas in the span of a single week.