The U.S. Senate’s second impeachment hearing against former President Trump (R-Texas) takes place today (Feb. 9). House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has announced that Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat, will serve as the chief impeachment manager for the impeachment.
Raskin, 58, and Trump were both sworn in in January 2017, and the first case Raskin initiated in the House as a House member was a challenge to Florida’s 2016 Electoral College vote that resulted in Trump’s election as president of the United States.
Raskin will reportedly be the first to speak at the impeachment hearing on Jan. 9 and will claim that Trump sparked an “uprising” on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6 by accusing the left of stealing the U.S. election results in 2020.
Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) argued that the impeachment is incredibly weak, not only because Trump is out of office, but also because President Trump’s Jan. 6 speech was simply an exercise of his right to free speech.
Jordan said Raskin had challenged the Florida Electoral College’s votes in favor of Trump in 2017, yet at this year’s Jan. 6 joint session of the two chambers, Raskin wanted to bar Republican House members from challenging the Pennsylvania Electoral College’s results. He said, “That’s completely hypocritical.”
According to a Feb. 8 report in the Washington Times, Raskin was born in the District of Columbia in Washington, D.C., and is now a member of the House of Delegates from Montgomery County, Maryland’s 8th Congressional District.
He received his bachelor’s degree from Harvard Law School in 1987 and later served as general counsel of a nonprofit organization. He is currently a professor of constitutional law at American University’s Washington College of Law, where he has defended a series of gay and lesbian cases and defended the abolition of the death penalty. He has also tried to repeal the Electoral College vote by promoting a national popular vote bill in the House of Representatives.
He was successfully elected to the Maryland Democratic Senate in 2007 and is running for Congress after nearly a decade in the state Senate. His wife, Sarah Raskin, is the Obama administration’s deputy secretary of the Treasury.
Raskin’s 25-year-old son, Thomas, died of depression on New Year’s Eve 2021. His Family buried Thomas on Jan. 5, and riots broke out on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6. Pelosi asked Raskin to draft impeachment papers against Trump just hours after the riot.
Analysts at the Wall Street Journal also believe that it is highly unlikely that Laskin will be able to convict Trump in the end. Since there are currently 50 Republican and 50 Democratic members of the Senate, it will take the support of 67 senators to convict Trump during the impeachment hearings. And there are already 45 Republican senators who are unanimous in saying that the Democratic impeachment of Trump is unconstitutional, so they are against this impeachment.
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