Jamie Raskin’s Failure to Resist Trump
Rep. Jamie Raskin is set to be the top Democrat resisting Donald Trump and defending democracy on a key committee — less than a year after handing him expanded spying powers.
Representative Jamie Raskin questions US Secret Service director Kimberly Cheatle during a House Oversight Committee hearing examining potential security failures surrounding the attempted assassination of Donald Trump, on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC, July 22, 2024. (Chris Kleponis / AFP via Getty Images)
To hear him tell it, Rep. Jamie Raskin is running to be the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee to protect democracy.
“We are in the fight of our lives. The stakes have gone up since the election,” he wrote to his fellow Democrats this week. With Donald Trump in the White House, he and House Democrats as a whole were duty bound to “defend our nation against tyranny” and to “stand in the breach to defend the principles and institutions of constitutional democracy.”
“We dare not fail,” he warned.
The only problem is, they already did — and they did so in large part thanks to Raskin himself, a longtime progressive legislator who earlier this year cast the crucial vote that killed a surveillance reform and handed the incoming president the exact kind of tyrannical powers he now says he will devote himself to resisting.
The April 2024 episode concerned a set of proposed reforms to the “backdoor search” loophole in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) law that has allowed agencies like the National Security Agency (NSA) and the FBI to read Americans’ private messages for years without the constitutionally required nuisance of getting a warrant. Privacy and civil liberties advocates spent more than a decade trying to get rid of the wildly abused provision, which lets government agencies get away with this intrusion as long as they do it with communications that were “incidentally” collected — meaning, that were gathered and stored after an American talked to a foreigner, whom US agencies can freely spy on without a warrant.
This past April provided an ideal chance to finally end this practice. Trump’s outrage at the FBI surveillance of his 2016 presidential campaign produced an unlikely coalition of progressives and MAGA Republicans, who united to bring forward a bipartisan amendment ending the loophole. As a result, the votes were there to finally overcome entrenched opposition to the reform.
Except the House was deadlocked, 212-212.
In other words, just one vote could have made the difference. Rep. Jerrold Nadler — the current ranking member on the Judiciary Committee, who Raskin was set to challenge until Nadler unexpectedly stepped down and endorsed his younger colleague yesterday — had voted for it. But Raskin, who is now the front-runner to replace him, voted against it.
“This was a particularly important instance where standing up would have been especially important, and he failed to do so,” says Alex Marthews, chair of Restore the Fourth, one member of the coalition of civil liberties organizations that worked on the reform:
He therefore bears part of the responsibility for the renewal of warrantless surveillance powers and their expansion in time for the reelection of President Trump. Since he is running for ranking member, that is a part of his record that people should legitimately ask him about.
Ripe for Abuse
It’s not clear why Raskin, who had consistently voted for the reform in previous years, caved when it mattered most. Raskin’s office didn’t explain or offer any comment when Jacobin reached out to ask. It was reported at the time that both the Biden White House and spy agencies themselves had lobbied lawmakers to vote against it — ironic, given the ubiquitous warnings from the president about how Trump was “determined to destroy democracy” if he won later that year.
What is clear is the degree to which Raskin’s vote has imperiled the very activists and social movements that Trump and others have vowed to go after once in power.
Wired reported that US House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence chair Mike Turner, known as a mouthpiece for the intelligence establishment, pointed to pro-Palestinian protesters in a briefing last year as an example of why the backdoor search loophole shouldn’t be eliminated. In other words, such protesters were a potential security threat connected to terrorists and needed to be spied on.
Meanwhile, Trump and his team have explicit plans to target and repress both the pro-Palestinian movement and progressive activists more generally. To run the FBI, which routinely abuses this loophole, the president-elect has nominated Kash Patel, a loyalist who has vowed to go after journalists, lawyers, and judges he views as Trump’s enemies, and who believes Trump’s political opponents in the Democratic Party and elsewhere have been installed and are controlled by foreign enemies.
The fact that Raskin allowed the warrantless surveillance loophole to survive will make it much easier for both the incoming Trump administration and the national security establishment that views activist movements with suspicion to target dissenters. Among those whose communications the FBI has spied on using this loophole are journalists, mosques, scores of George Floyd protesters, thousands of campaign donors, and a college professor, as well as a range of current and former government officials, including a senator, congressman, state senator, and state court judge.
Bear in mind that the Heritage Foundation — the right-wing think tank that serves as the policy shop for Republican presidencies and is behind Trump’s Project 2025 agenda — has proposed investigating, publicly shaming, and otherwise going after pro-Palestinian activists and progressive members of Congress. But progressive causes aren’t the only ones that might suffer either: a number of those who the FBI surveilled without a warrant in the past were protesters arrested on January 6.
“It is reassuring for any representative to say they want to serve as a check on abuses of executive power,” says Marthews. “But it would be much more reassuring if Raskin had showed he was willing to check abuses of executive power when the president was a Democrat.”
This wasn’t the only questionable vote Raskin took that day. Despite warning that Trump was “in full-blown autocratic, dictatorial mode at this point,” Raskin helped to massively expand the spying powers at his disposal if he won, by voting for the Reforming Intelligence and Securing America Act. (Nadler and fifty-eight other Democrats, including many progressives, had voted against it.)
One especially shocking provision of the law, added by Turner, gave the government the power to compel a range of businesses and other third parties, whether cleaners or delivery drivers, to spy on Americans on its behalf. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, at least 23 percent of its fifty-six supposed reforms “either codify existing practices and procedures . . . or actively weaken existing protections.”
In many ways, Raskin should be an ideal pick for the Judiciary spot: he’s an influential progressive stalwart who has long cultivated close ties to civil liberties and privacy advocates. Yet when it mattered most and could have actually made a difference, he failed at the task he’s now using to justify his ascent to a powerful position on an important committee. The question is, will that be a concern for a Democratic caucus that looks set to overwhelmingly approve him?