Why It's So Crucial To Try Our Best To Elect More Members Of Congress Like Jamie Raskin

There are 7,386 state legislative seats in the U.S., from just 49 in Nebraska, the only state with a unicameral legislature, to a massive 424 in New Hampshire, where each House member represents, on average, something like 3,500 people, making it possible for the Representatives to talk to each voter who wants to talk with them! At any given time, about half the members of Congress were previously members of their state legislatures. Some of Congress’ most productive members cut their teeth in their state legislatures, like Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY), Ted Lieu (D-CA), Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), Adam Schiff (D-CA), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Bonnie Watson Coleman (NJ), Judy Chu (D-CA), Summer Lee (D-PA), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Jeff Merkley (D-OR), Steny Hoyer (D-MD), Nikema Williams (D-GA), Barbara Lee (D-CA) and— drum roll, please— Jamie Raskin (D-MD).

Blue America has tried to find legislative leaders early in their careers and support them, in the hopes that they would go on to become strong national leaders, as we did with Ted Lieu, Jeff Merkley, Pramila Jayapal, Rashida Tlaib, Adam Schiff, Ilhan Omar, Bonnie Watson Coleman, Judy Chu and Jamie Raskin. Successful state legislators hit the ground running and understand what it takes to build a successful congressional career, from building a strong staff to fostering alliances, both on their own side of the aisle and, when possible, across the aisle.

One of the House members we’re most proud of— whose career path went though the state legislature— is Jamie Raskin, a progressive powerhouse who beat a conservative Democrat in the 2006 primary for a state Senate seat, accrued a powerful record of accomplishment and was then elected to Congress ten years later.

I’m hoping the next Jamie Raskin is on the Blue America list of endorsed legislative candidates. I actually introduced Raskin to then 21-year old Ben Braver by asking him if he wants to meet a younger version of himself! (I know that takes a lot of temerity but they did meet in person and Raskin endorsed him, referencing a Neil Young-Stephen Stills song: “Ben Braver is exactly the kind of politically passionate and intellectually fearless young person we need in state government across the country today. Long may he run.”) Back to Raskin for a moment. As ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, he and Robert Garcia, the ranking member of the national security subcommittee, sent Trump a letter yesterday asking about the $10 million cash bribe Trump took from Egyptian dictator Abdel Fattah El-Sisi just before the 2016 election. The investigation was subsequently derailed by Trump’s egregiously corrupt Attorney General William Barr.

“Surely you would agree,” Raskin and Garcia wrote to Trump, “that the American people deserve to know whether a former president— and a current candidate for president— took an illegal campaign contribution from a brutal foreign dictator. Accordingly, we request that you immediately provide the Committee with information and documents necessary to assure the Committee and the American public that you never, directly or indirectly, politically or personally, received any funds from the Egyptian President or government.”

Getting down into specifics, Raskin and Garcia wrote that [I]n September 2016, less than two months prior to the 2016 presidential election, you met with President El-Sisi in a closed-door meeting on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York City. It is not clear what was discussed during this sidebar conference. However, what is clear is that following this private tête-à-tête, you publicly praised the autocratic Egyptian leader in a sharp departure from official U.S. policy. While others at the time ‘emphasized the importance of respect for rule of law and human rights to Egypt’s future progress,’ you called President El-Sisi a ‘fantastic guy’ and praised his tactics for taking’ control’ of Egypt. As President, you continued to praise President El-Sisi and drastically shifted U.S. policy in ways to benefit the reviled Egyptian leader. While calling President El-Sisi your ‘favorite dictator,’ you released $195 million in military aid in 2018 that the United States had previously withheld because of human rights abuses committed by the Egyptian government, and later released an additional $1.2 billion in military assistance. On October 28, 2016, a few weeks after your closed-door meeting with President El-Sisi and at a time when your flailing presidential campaign was in dire need of a cash infusion, you announced that you were personally contributing $10 million to your own campaign, something you had been famously disinclined to do. This was especially notable because earlier that year Deutsche Bank, your long-time creditor and one of the few banks that had still been willing to extend you loans, emphatically declined your request for additional credit. In later interviews with DOJ investigators, Steve Bannon, your campaign’s Chief Executive Officer and the intellectual leader of the MAGA movement, explained that by October 2016 your campaign was severely cash-strapped but that you would not donate to your own campaign at the time because you were ‘not a guy who while six to eight points down, was going to write $25 million dollar checks.’ Eventually, however, according to Mr. Bannon, Steven Mnuchin, your future Secretary of the Treasury, and Jared Kushner, your son-in-law, insisted that you needed to loan $10 million to your campaign ‘to buy television time’ in the last couple of weeks of the election. According to Mr. Bannon, Mr. Mnuchin, attempted to convince you that enough contributions from small donors would eventually come in to repay the loan, but you remained unwilling to extend the loan to your campaign. However, according to Mr. Bannon, you ultimately and mysteriously ‘became convinced that the cash would be there.’ That money ended up paying for, among other things, your antisemitic closing TV ad in which you denounced ‘global special interests’ as shadowy photographs of George Soros, Lloyd Blankfein, and Janet Yellen appeared on screen.”

There are 7 glorious pages of these kinds of hard-hitting demands of Trump in the letter. By all means, read the whole thing. Carol Leonnig and Aaron Davis reported that “As members of the House minority, Raskin and Garcia do not have the power to subpoena documents or witnesses, and Trump is under no obligation to respond to their inquiries. But the Democrats said the public deserves answers now that Trump is running for president again” 

The Post noted that Raskin’s and Garcia’s letter “asks Trump to name the source of any funds he used to repay himself for that forgiven loan, if he did, and to name any individuals or entities who were involved in funding, arranging or transferring money for the original loan to his campaign or its repayment. Raskin and Garcia emphasized in the letter that the General Intelligence Service, Egypt’s intelligence agency and a key entity under scrutiny in the Justice Department investigation of Trump, has been implicated by U.S. prosecutors in an effort to corruptly buy influence with another prominent U.S. official, former senator Bob Menendez, a Democrat from New Jersey. General Intelligence Service leaders helped fund cash bribes to Menendez through an Egyptian-American business. Menendez was convicted in July on charges of accepting bribes and acting as an unregistered foreign agent of Egypt. He resigned from the Senate last month.”