Jamie speaks to students at Montgomery Blair
High School in Silver Spring

A HANDS-ON PROGRESSIVE

A lifelong progressive Democrat, Raskin has brought innovative ideas and a hands-on approach to government and politics at every level.

He has served on the Montgomery County Hate Crimes Commission, the Takoma Park Election Redistricting Task Force, and the Takoma Park Gun Policy Task Force. From 1998 to 2005, Raskin served as the chairman of Montgomery County State’s Attorney Doug Gansler’s campaign committee, where he helped develop the community-based prosecution plan now in effect in Montgomery County.

In 1999, Governor Parris Glendening tapped Raskin to become the first Chairman of the Maryland State Higher Education Labor Relations Board, which the legislature created to secure the right to organize on campus. Under Raskin’s leadership of the Board, thousands of employees at institutions of higher learning in Maryland achieved collective bargaining rights for the first time in state history.

Raskin has earned national recognition as a voice for democracy, and as a civil-rights and civil-liberties advocate. In 1992, he served on President Clinton's Justice Department Transition Team for the Civil Rights Division. He was elected as a Kerry-Edwards Delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 2004. He currently serves on the advisory board of Progressive Democrats of America.

A ‘PASSIONATE’ VOICE FOR VOTERS

A member of the board of FairVote, the nation’s leading electoral-reform group, Raskin is perhaps best known as a champion of voters’ rights. In his 2003 book, “Overruling Democracy: The Supreme Court versus The American People,” Raskin documented the Rehnquist Court majority’s assault on voting rights in the 2000 election, and placed Bush v. Gore in the context of a series of Supreme Court decisions undermining the participatory rights of the people.

Focusing on the Rehnquist majority’s statement that the “individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote” for president, Raskin argued for a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to vote (and to get one’s vote counted) to all Americans.

He has worked closely with Rep. Jesse Jackson, Jr. to advance a voting rights amendment in Congress, and with Rep. Eleanor Holmes Norton to advance a voting rights agenda for the people of Washington, D.C.

The D.C. City Council unanimously praised Jamie’s “passionate advocacy” for the voting rights of the disenfranchised.

A RECORD OF INNOVATION AND ACTION

Raskin has built a reputation as an innovator whose ideas gain traction. His 2000 article for Slate magazine introduced the idea of Internet “vote trading” in the 2000 election, to convince Ralph Nader supporters in swing states like Florida and Wisconsin to vote for Vice President Al Gore, and to have equal numbers of Democrats vote for Nader in Republican states such as Texas and Alabama. This tactic picked up at least 35,000 votes for Gore in swing states before Republican State Attorney Generals and Secretaries of State threatened criminal prosecution of the Web site organizers.

In 1999, Raskin founded the Marshall-Brennan Constitutional Literacy Project at the Washington College of Law. Organized with the widows of the late Justices Thurgood Marshall and William Brennan, the project sends top law students into 20 public high schools in Maryland and Washington, D.C., to teach the U.S. Constitution through cases that affect students most directly.

That same year, Raskin wrote “We the Students: Supreme Court Cases for and about America’s Students,” in which he collects and analyzes the 50 most important Supreme Court decisions about the rights and responsibilities of America’s students. The book, which serves as the text for the Marshall-Brennan Project, has sold 25,000 copies, and the project has become a national model, adopted by the law schools at Rutgers University, the University of Pennsylvania, Arizona State University, the University of Oregon, and Howard University.

BACKGROUND

Born Jamin B. Raskin at George Washington University Hospital on December 13, 1962, Raskin grew up in the area and has lived in his current home in Takoma Park for 16 years. His mother, Barbara, was a best -selling novelist and the founding president of the national writers’ union. His father, Marcus, a George Washington University professor, was an aide to President Kennedy on the National Security Council and is the founder of the Institute for Policy Studies.

A graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School, where he was editor of the law review, Raskin served as Assistant Attorney General in Massachusetts before moving to Takoma Park in the late 1980s. He then served as the general counsel of the National Rainbow Coalition, working with the Rev. Jesse Jackson to expand the base of the Democratic Party and open it up to new voices, new communities and new ideas.

In 1990, he became a law professor at American University’s Washington College of Law, and later academic dean of the law school. He currently directs the school’s Program on Law and Government.

Raskin and his wife, Sarah Bloom Raskin, live in Takoma Park with their three children, Hannah, 13, Tommy, 10, and Tabitha, 8. All three children attend public schools in Takoma Park and Silver Spring.