In a conversation with Jmore shortly before the second inauguration of President Donald Trump in January of 2025, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) said he believed Americans were in for “the fight of our lives.”
Raskin – who made national headlines earlier this month for his heated exchanges with Attorney General Pam Bondi during a House Judiciary Committee hearing — still feels that American democratic values and ideals are on the line.
“There’s no guarantee here,” he said in a recent interview with Jmore. “This is our turn in American history to pledge those things to each other again.”
Jmore caught up with Raskin, 63, a former constitutional law professor who has represented Maryland’s 8th congressional district since 2017, to discuss his views on the current national political scene.
Why do you feel there is there so much cynicism about politics and politicians these days among voters and non-voters?
Trump and his team have done everything they can to make the public cynical about elections generally. We have to explain to people that that is an authoritarian tactic. [Russian President]Vladimir Putin uses this tactic. He installs regimes of complete corruption and authoritarian rule. Then, he and other authoritarians tell everybody how much government sucks.
But we’ve made tremendous progress over the course of American history with democratic government, and we can’t surrender it. We have to keep moving forward.
A lot of people are concerned about how immigrants and others are being treated by the government, particularly by ICE agents.
Secretary Kristi Noem and the Department of Homeland Security are creating an atmosphere of fear and terror in many parts of the country. They are shooting American citizens dead for exercising their First Amendment and Second Amendment rights. They are trying to create a climate of intimidation.
That means everybody around the country has got to be acting with as much courage as possible to reject these tactics of fear and state terror.
Some people are concerned that the U.S. Supreme Court and its rulings that have reversed progress. Are there ways to modify the power of the Supreme Court?
Trump and the MAGA-Republicans understand they’ve got a very good deal going right now with the Roberts court, so they’re not interested in imposing an ethics code. The U.S. Supreme Court is the only supreme court in the land which doesn’t have a binding ethics code. Every state supreme court has a binding ethics code.
If you’re complaining about Clarence Thomas or Samuel Alito having a conflict of interest, you bring that to Clarence Thomas or Samuel Alito and they get to decide. That’s not a very strong ethics system.
What can we do about that?
When we set government back on the right path and have a Democratic Congress and Democratic president, we have to talk about the ways the Supreme Court put us in a straitjacket when it came to dealing with a lawless and corrupt president. They gave him immunity from prosecution for the first time in American history. They completely effaced part of the 14th Amendment, which says that people who participate in insurrections or rebellions against the union shall never be allowed to hold federal office again. And generally, they have been eagerly complicit with Trump.
We have to look at serious Supreme Court structural reform. We have nine Supreme Court justices, but we have 13 federal circuits. That means in the best of times, four federal circuits are completely left out of having a member on the Supreme Court.
In reality, it’s much worse than that. The vast majority of federal circuits are not represented at all today. In fact, five of our justices come from New York. We have one Supreme Court justice for each borough of New York. That makes no sense. Let’s move from nine justices to 13 justices and guarantee that each federal circuit gets one justice.
Anything else?
Yes, we can recognize the obvious scientific truth that life expectancy today is 25 or 30 years longer than it was when the Constitution was written. The idea of life tenure for a Supreme Court justice was very different when the average life expectancy in the country was something like 64 or 65.
Today, we could have some of these justices on the court for 40 or 50 or 60 years, depending on how old they were when they got in. And they have socialized health care for themselves, and they have a very gentle work schedule. A lot of them are going to be able to survive forever.
We really need term limits, 18-year term limits. It’s consistent with the constitutional life tenure provision.
As long as they’re not kicked off the federal bench, they could work on a district court or an appeals court. Or they could be in senior status, which is what a lot of judges and justices do now.
Let’s talk about the Middle East. Is peace still possible between Israelis and Palestinians?
Sometimes, the governments and the political leadership have to get out of the way and the people have to demand change. I eagerly await the day when mass numbers of Israelis and Palestinians demand peace in a different direction for their region and for their communities.
I’ve got to believe it’s coming soon because there are so many problems bearing down on the people of the world. From authoritarianism to dramatic climate change, we really don’t have time to be obsessed with the animosities of the past. We need to move forward to the effective cooperation of the future.
Peter Arnold is a local freelance writer.
The Columbia resident worked on the Gemini and Apollo space missions.
A St. Louis native, Edelman served as ambassador to the central African nation from 1987 to 1989.
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