Meet Jamie Raskin
Congressman Jamie Raskin proudly represents Maryland’s 8th Congressional District in the U.S. House of Representatives. He was sworn into his fifth Term at the start of the 119th Congress on January 3, 2025.
Jamie has represented Maryland’s 8th since he ran for Congress in 2016 and prevailed in what was then the most expensive House primary election in American history. Before taking office in January of 2017, he had been a professor of constitutional law and the First Amendment for a quarter-century at American University’s Washington College of Law, where he authored several books and launched the acclaimed Marshall-Brennan Constitutional Literacy Project. In 2006, he ran for State Senate in District 20 (Silver Spring and Takoma Park) and defeated a 32-year incumbent by a 2-1 margin, telling voters, “It’s not my ambition to be in the political center, it’s my ambition to be in the moral center—and to bring the political center to us.”
In three terms in the State Senate, he rose to become Majority Whip and became famous for building bipartisan coalitions and leading complex floor fights to pass major legislation, including marriage equality, abolition of the death penalty, restoration of voting rights to former prisoners, tough anti-drunk driving laws, the first National Popular Vote measure in America, a medical marijuana program, and the world’s first Benefit Corporation law. He was recognized by the Maryland Gazette of Politics and Business as one of the state’s top ten “Most Effective Legislators” and by the Silver Spring Voice as “Montgomery County’s Most Responsive Elected Official.”
Elected to Congress the same night in November 2016 that Donald Trump won the presidency, Jamie went to work immediately to rally the Democrats locally and nationally and—as a key Member of the House Judiciary Committee, Oversight and Reform Committee, Rules Committee and Administration Committee—to oppose the lawlessness, corruption and extremism of the Trump Administration.
When Democrats recaptured the House majority in 2018, Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings appointed Jamie Chair of the Oversight Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, a position from which he proceeded to zealously defend voting rights, free speech, the rights of labor and working people, and reproductive freedom and the rights of women. Jamie was also named to the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus and pressed hard for a nationwide strategy to crush the virus, the strategy never offered by the Trump administration.
In the aftermath of January 6, 2021, when Donald Trump incited a violent insurrection against the Constitution and attempted a political coup to block the counting of electoral college votes, Jamie drafted an impeachment article against Trump with his colleagues Ted Lieu, Joe Neguse, and David Cicilline. After the House voted to impeach Trump by 232-197 for trying to seize the presidency and prevent the peaceful transfer of power, then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi asked Jamie to become the lead impeachment manager in Trump’s second Senate impeachment trial. That week-long trial, which galvanized the nation and the world, resulted in a 57-43 vote against Trump—the most sweeping bipartisan vote to convict an impeached president in American history. After the trial, Speaker Pelosi named Jamie a member of the new Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol which produced a devastating narrative report and video account of Donald Trump’s plans to overthrow the constitutional order and seize the presidency, which he had lost in 2020 by more than 7 million votes, 306-232 in the Electoral College.
Jamie was chosen by his Democratic colleagues in the 118th Congress to lead the Democrats on the House Committee on Oversight and Accountability. In that capacity he organized his extraordinary colleagues to debunk and demolish the GOP’s fraudulent and hapless “impeachment drive” against President Joe Biden, which had been the Republicans’ top priority for the 118th Congress.
As Democrats prepared for the 119th Congress, Jamie chose to leave his secure position as Ranking Member on the House Oversight Committee to run for Ranking Member on the House Judiciary Committee. He was elected unanimously by the House Democratic Caucus. A former state assistant attorney general and editor of the Harvard Law Review, Jamie said he would lead the Democrats in rebuffing the MAGA assault on the Constitution and the Supreme Court, the Department of Justice, voting rights, birthright citizenship and immigrant rights and the reproductive freedoms of American women.
Jamie is Vice-Chair of Organizing for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the founder and leader of Democracy Summer, the Democrats’ acclaimed nationwide program which has engaged thousands of young people in training for political activism and “leadership for strong democracy and freedom.”
As a law professor and political leader, Jamie has written dozens of essays and several notable books, including We the Students: Supreme Court Cases for and about America’s Students and Overruling Democracy: The Supreme Court vs. The American People, a Washington Post Bestseller. His most recent book, Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy addressed the catastrophic loss of Jamie and Sarah’s son Tommy, the shocking events of January 6, 2021, and Donald Trump’s second Senate impeachment trial for inciting insurrection. This book received nationwide critical and popular acclaim, topping several bestseller lists including the New York Times and the Washington Post. Harvard Law Professor Larry Tribe called it a “masterpiece.”
Jamie graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review and where he met his wife Sarah, who is a law professor at Duke and a former Maryland state banking commissioner and Deputy Secretary of the United States Treasury. They are the parents of three children, Hannah Grace, Thomas Bloom (1995–2020), and Tabitha Claire and a granddaughter. They live in Takoma Park with their dogs Toby and Potter.
Members of the House are responsible for introducing and voting on federal legislation, representing the interests of their constituents, and providing oversight of the executive branch. Key powers include drafting bills, serving on committees, approving the federal budget, and voting on matters of national policy, including declarations of war and presidential impeachments.