The Vermont Conversation with David Goodman is a VTDigger podcast that features in-depth interviews on local and national issues. Listen below and subscribe for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get podcasts.
In 2016, Jamie Raskin was elected to Congress from Maryland just as Donald Trump was first elected president. Raskin, a former constitutional law professor, and Trump, a real estate developer who flouts rules and shatters norms, have been locked in a struggle ever since.
When Congress impeached Trump in 2021 for inciting an insurrection, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi tapped Raskin to be the lead impeachment manager, essentially Trump’s chief prosecutor. He subsequently served on the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.
Raskin is now the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee and has been a vocal adversary of the Trump administration. In the past few weeks, he has accused U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem of “unlawfully detaining U.S. citizens,” demanded that Trump explain “a blatantly illegal and unconstitutional effort to steal $230 million from the American people” and denounced “military-style tactics” in Chicago.
Jamie Raskin represents Maryland’s 8th Congressional District, which borders Washington, D.C. He has authored several books, including the bestseller “Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth and the Trials of American Democracy,” a searing exploration of the death of his son and the struggle to defend democracy under Trump.
I spoke with Raskin on Tuesday as the government shutdown approached the one month mark.
This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
David Goodman
American democracy and the Constitution are undergoing a stress test right now. How do you think they’re holding up?
Rep. Jamie Raskin
I think that the people are holding up better and better, and the people are very much leading the movement against authoritarianism. The No Kings rallies were an astonishment. Speaking as a political person and as an old-school organizer from my college days, to put 7 million people in the streets is quite a stunning accomplishment, the largest protest in American history. So that’s powerful. In civil society, more and more people are standing up. The colleges and universities that take a stand are the ones that have become popular, and the ones that cave in are the ones who look awful. It’s the same thing with the law firms. The ones who’ve caved in like Paul Weiss look like capitulationists to authoritarians.
Here’s what’s going on in the courts: there have been more than 400 cases brought against this reign of lawlessness and terror and we have won between 85 and 90% of the cases in district court, and similarly impressive numbers in the appeals courts. Some of the most moving opinions have been by Republican appointees rejecting unlawful deployment of the National Guard, rejecting the attempt to strip birthright citizenship from people born in the United States. Our problem has just been one court in the land, and unfortunately, it’s the highest court in the land. It’s the Roberts Court. And when they’ve been able to get things into their so-called shadow docket, the emergency docket, then the numbers reverse, and we’ve been losing overwhelmingly there. We haven’t lost completely. There have been some things we’ve been able to hang on to, but they slice the baloney extremely fine up at the Roberts Court. It is a MAGA-dominated court, and that’s been our major problem.
So the bottom line is, we’re just in the fight of our lives and it’s a struggle every single day. But the more you get out to large numbers of people, the more we’re winning. A great example of that is the Jimmy Kimmel episode, where millions and millions of people registered their protest in a massive public outcry against the president purporting to get to appoint national comedians or veto national comedians. That’s not the role of the President of the United States under the first amendment. We have the right to make fun of every politician without getting kicked off of the air. And I think that was asserted very strongly by the people, and ultimately by ABC and Disney, and certainly by Kimmel, who’s only gotten more popular and funnier ever since this happened.
David Goodman
One of the under-reported elements of that Kimmel affair was the role that a boycott played. Following Kimmel’s suspension in September, some 3 million people cancelled their Disney+ subscriptions, Disney-owned Hulu lost 4 million subscribers, and Disney lost over $6 billion in valuation within a week.
This made it into Jimmy Kimmel’s first monologue on his return when he joked that the network asked him to explain to people how to resubscribe to Disney+. The mayor of Chicago has spoken of the need for a national strike. Will Democrats, who are under attack in their cities, begin to use economic power as one of the ways they respond?
Rep. Jamie Raskin
This has always been a part of democratic movement politics in American history. Dr. King was critically boosted by the Montgomery bus boycott and went down to Montgomery because this had begun. That was the central mechanism for turning things around in Montgomery and making the small businesses and the big businesses in Alabama feel the weight of the consumer purchasing power of the African American community and its allies. We saw with the grape boycott, the lettuce boycott, all of these things have been critical mechanisms of political protest and change.
David Goodman
And there was Gandhi’s Salt March and the Boston Tea Party. These economic actions have always been a cornerstone of effective resistance.
Rep. Jamie Raskin
That’s absolutely right. More and more the pro-democracy, pro-freedom forces in the country are feeling the power and flexing the muscle and the muscle memory of what a consumer boycott is.
David Goodman
Of the many shocking images that flash across our screens right now, the most disturbing is the sight of US troops in American cities and masked federal agents randomly abducting and assaulting people with seemingly no accountability. You and Representative Jayapal recently wrote a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem demanding, “Why do you continue unlawfully detaining U.S. citizens?” Has anything worked to restrain ICE or to slow down this military assault?
Rep. Jamie Raskin
Everything works to a certain extent, which is why no good act in this process is wasted. People need to speak out. I just finished Alexei Navalny’s book called “Patriot.” He wrote it from one of Putin’s filthy prisons after Navalny made the breathtaking decision to go back to Russia, knowing exactly what he would face there. Navalny said the critical thing is that you’ve got to do the thing that the regime fears the most, which is you’ve got to tell the truth at every turn. That’s why if they are apprehending and detaining and deporting in some cases US citizens, we need to document that. We need to protest it. We need to assert the absolute legal illegitimacy of it.
That’s true of everything that goes on every day, whether we’re talking about the bulldozing of the White House in violation of all kinds of laws, including a law criminalizing the destruction of federal property, to stripping people of birthright citizenship, to the recent news that Donald Trump is seeking to get a check written by Todd Blanche, the Deputy Attorney General and his former private defense lawyer, for $230 million to him because of how much pain and suffering was inflicted on him when there was a judicial search warrant executed at Mar-a-Lago and when there was an investigation into Putin’s interference in the 2016 presidential election in America. He might not like the fact that there was a judicial search warrant leveled against him, but if everybody got $230 million when that happened, that would be hundreds of thousands of people across the country who have search warrants executed against their homes and offices every year. And no, you don’t get to walk off with a quarter billion dollars because of that.
We need to be speaking out about every single episode of criminality, every single high crime and misdemeanor, every single violation of the Constitution.
David Goodman
Today, we learned there were another three strikes on four boats in the eastern Pacific, this time killing 14 people in just one day, bringing the running total to around 60 people who’ve been killed in what Senator Rand Paul has called “extrajudicial killings.” What is going on here and what can be done to reassert the law?
Rep. Jamie Raskin
Well I will tell you one thing it’s not: it’s not a war, because a war has not been declared by Congress, so he’s acting outside of the Constitution. Nor is it a criminal investigation or police action that’s at all cognizable by the US Constitution, because the President has appointed himself in this scenario the police, the prosecutor, the judge, the jury and the executioner all in one swift moment. So if it’s not a war, and if it’s not a legitimate police investigative prosecution, what is it? Well, it is indeed an extrajudicial, extra-constitutional military police action. He’s sending warships and aircraft carriers from Europe into the Caribbean Sea in order to conduct these strikes on people without any proof or evidence or showing that these people are at war with the United States or even that they’re drug dealers. And being a drug dealer doesn’t subject you to instantaneous capital punishment outside of due process anyway.
This is why I’ve come to believe that “due process” are the two most beautiful words in the Constitution. Because it’s what separates everybody’s rights and freedoms from arbitrary state power. If they can do this to people who we suspect are foreigners, why can’t they do that in America to ships off our coast, or ships in the Great Lakes or on a river someplace? They’re asserting this completely lawless power to do it.
One of my Republican colleagues said to me when we were debating this one day, “You’re not for due process for guilty people, are you?” And I’m like, “Yeah, that’s the whole point. We don’t know that they’re guilty people until they’ve had due process.”
David Goodman
Trump is a master of distraction, waving shiny keys over here so you don’t look over there. What do you worry that we’re not paying enough attention to right now?
Rep. Jamie Raskin
You just raised one of those, which is this casual licensing of the idea that Trump can just go around the world blowing up ships when he wants to. People are rightfully outraged and infuriated by the deployment of National Guard troops and other military troops into our cities, and also the use of ICE in a completely unrecognizable way. These are people who are in masks, driving unmarked cars, conducting warrantless arrests, and nobody knows what the hell is going on. People are furious all over the country when they see what they’re doing in our communities. Whoever heard of Army troops or Navy sailors or Air Force people in masks? It doesn’t make any sense, and yet they’ve created this monstrous ICE force which they’re trying to define as somehow outside of the rule of law, and we can’t tolerate that. We have a constitution that applies to every part of the US government. You cannot create parts of the government that are extralegal or lawless.
A lot of the Declaration of Independence was about the king keeping standing armies in people’s communities without legislative consent, swarming officers into communities to intimidate people, quartering large bodies of armed troops among the people, cutting off trade with other parts of the world unilaterally without the consent of the legislatures, imposing taxes and tariffs on people without their consent. This stuff goes back to the beginning. Our Posse Comitatus Act says that you can’t use the army for ordinary law enforcement purposes.
David Goodman
So many of the decisions at the lower court levels go to die at the Supreme Court, especially in the shadow dockets. President Biden resisted talk of reforming or expanding the court. Do you think this makes a case for reforming the court in some fashion, whether it’s expanding it or something else?
Rep. Jamie Raskin
The court has been deformed. It has been packed and stacked and sliced and diced and gerrymandered by the MAGA Federalist Society project. Take my constituent, Merrick Garland, who became Attorney General under President Biden. He was nominated to the Supreme Court by Barack Obama in February 2016 in the last year of Obama’s term, after the death of Justice Scalia. Then Sen. Mitch McConnell said, “No, 11 months is too close to the next election. We’re going to let the people decide,” completely avoiding the fact that the people had decided by giving Barack Obama one of those genuine, bonafide four year terms in office, where even in the last year he had the right to nominate judges and justices. They just pocket vetoed his nomination. He never even had a hearing. Then when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September 2020, that was just a couple months before the election. And everybody said (to Sen. McConnell), “Well, you didn’t allow Obama to get his nominee heard, you’re not going to hear the Trump nominee, are you?” And he just laughed and said, “Oh, that was a rule for Democratic presidents. That’s not for us.” And then within a seven or eight week period, they just railroaded and barreled through Amy Coney Barrett.
There’s illegitimacy in terms of the composition of the court. There’s clearly illegitimacy in terms of the jurisprudence of the court, just fabricating doctrines out of whole cloth, like the president is immune from prosecution for felony crimes committed within the core functions of his office. We went for more than two centuries without discovering that the President was actually immune from prosecution for felony crimes he committed under the auspices of his office? I don’t think so.
David Goodman
Is this a roundabout way of saying that you would support reform of the court in some fashion?
Rep. Jamie Raskin
We need dramatic reform of the Supreme Court. … We obviously can talk about changing the composition and the numerical composition of the Supreme Court. That’s not fixed by the Constitution, that’s set by statute. There have been nine or 10 different changes in our history to the numbers of people on the court. One of the things I’ve always thought is that it’s ridiculous that we have 13 federal circuits and just nine justices, which means that at any one time at least four circuits are going to be left out. Because there’s no geographic distribution requirement at all, certain places like New York City are radically disproportionately over represented. We have five justices from New York City on the court right now, which is basically one for each borough. I love visiting New York just like the next person, but I don’t think that we need five justices of whatever ideological stripe coming from New York City. If we wanted to revisit this, we can move to a 13 member court where each federal circuit is guaranteed at least one representative, which is actually the way the Federal Reserve Board does it, that there is a geographic representation requirement.
David Goodman
There has been a lot of criticism of the Democratic Party, most notably by Sen. Bernie Sanders, who said after the November 2024 election, “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”
What do you believe Democrats need to do to win back those who feel that they’ve been abandoned or feel that the party is not speaking for them?
Rep. Jamie Raskin
I certainly believe that we need to reinvigorate the right to organize a union, which has been just ripped to shreds in so many different ways through different kinds of retaliation by employers that does not get remotely sufficient redress by the National Labor Relations Board or in court. I believe in the creation of universal rights, including the right to organize and the right to collective bargaining. But the central one today we need to work on is the right to health care. That should be in America as it is in Canada or in most of the advanced industrial countries. That should be a universal right and entitlement that’s attendant to citizenship in the country. We’re in the richest society that’s ever existed at our richest moment that we’ve ever had and we can afford health insurance for our people, so we’re not constantly fighting these rear guard actions to try to defend Medicaid, ACA, tax credits and so on. The Republicans want to turn the clock back and throw millions of people off of the health care they have now, which in many cases is itself meager and inadequate, but it’s something.
I don’t think it’s in very good form for Bernie to be attacking the Democratic Party if he’s not willing to become a Democrat and join the Democratic party with all of its virtues and all of its flaws and struggle for it. I’m willing to stay in the Democratic Party and fight for a strong, true blue progressive program and not just attack the party from the outside.
David Goodman
Finally, we’ve been talking about the trials of the country as it’s enduring this stress test. You have your own experience confronting personal trials. What gives you hope and what enables you to persevere through these challenges?
Rep. Jamie Raskin
Well, I appreciate that, David. When I was growing up, my dad used to say to us, “When everything looks hopeless, you are the hope.” So I grew up with that sense of hope, and I suppose guilt and responsibility that all of us have to be fighting hard every single day. No matter how tough we might think something we’re going through is, there are almost undoubtedly people who are going through something even tougher. All of us can do something to help people right now who are facing the loss of their nutrition and food benefits in the SNAP program. All of us can do something to help people who are facing the loss of their health insurance because of the Republicans or the loss of Medicaid coverage.
Solidarity will be the watch word to get us through this nightmare. We can make it fun and we can make it exciting and we can make it uplifting and inspiring as the No Kings rallies have done. We have great comedians and artists and musicians, leaders, activists, organizers, commentators, writers, critics, poets. This is the culture of America. This is who we are. If you read the Constitution and its subsequent amendments, the whole trajectory of our development has been towards greater inclusion and greater democracy. The 13th amendment abolished slavery. The 14th amendment gave us equal protection and due process. The 15th amendment banned race discrimination in voting. The 17th amendment gave us direct election of US senators. The 19th Amendment doubled the franchise with women. The 23rd amendment said people in DC could participate in presidential elections. The 24th amendment banned poll taxes. The 26th amendment lowered the voting age. Of the 17 amendments we’ve had since the original Bill of Rights, the vast majority are about expanding and deepening democracy. There’s great hope in that. In some sense, what we’re living through with this Trump nightmare is just a reaction against that, a rebellion against the country we’ve become and the country that we are becoming.
People are defending democracy and freedom every day. Democracy is always a project. It’s something in motion. Tocqueville saw that in “Democracy in America.” He said democracy and voting rights in the country are either shrinking or they’re expanding. We’ve just got to get back on the expansionary growth track.
One thing I agree with Trump with is statehood. But I’m not talking about Greenland and Canada and Panama, which have not asked for statehood. I’m talking about Washington, DC, the only national capital on planet Earth not represented in its own legislature. I’m talking about 3.5 million people in Puerto Rico who don’t even get to vote for president and just tasted the bitter price of colonial subjection when they were cheated out of hundreds of millions of dollars in Hurricane Maria funding and Trump threw some paper towels at them.
We need a universal constitutional amendment giving everybody the right to vote. It’s 2025, how about we start electing the president the way we elect mayors and representatives and senators and governors? Whoever gets the most votes, wins, instead of this totally accident-prone electoral college system which is completely undemocratic and unrepresentative. It’s given us five popular vote losers in our history, twice in this century alone, in 2000 and 2016.
We need to really be moving democracy forward and strengthening democracy at the national level, at the state level, the county, the municipal level, strengthening democracy in the workplace and empowering our people. The alternative with Trump is we’re going to lapse into some other form of government, whether it’s monarchy or authoritarian dictatorship or plutocracy or theocracy — all those ingredients are there. We’ve got to fight for strong democracy in this century.
