Now, with Democrats once again confronting calls to try to remove Trump from office after his recent threat to wipe out the Iranian civilization, Raskin was asked by party leaders to talk the caucus through the range of options available to address presidential conduct before they reach a consensus position.
“There’s obviously tremendous anxiety in the country about the deranged conduct and behavior of the President,” Raskin says, while stressing that Democrats remain in the minority. “For people to say we should just go ahead and impeach him simply denies this political reality. There is not a single Republican who has called for impeachment or indicated to us interest in impeachment at this point.”
Read More: Calls to Impeach Trump Collide With Reluctant Democratic Leadership
Raskin notes that he does not plan to sway members in any direction during Friday’s caucus-wide call. “I’m not really advocating for this or that solution,” he says. “I’m really just trying to explain the constitutional design.”
TIME: You're speaking with the caucus tomorrow. Can you preview to me what your message is to Democrats about the path forward on impeachment or the 25th Amendment?
I know that for nearly a decade, you've proposed that Congress create an independent commission on presidential capacity that would effectively allow Congress to declare the president unfit to serve. Do you plan to talk to Democrats about getting behind that proposal, given that it's unlikely you can convince the Vice President and the majority of the cabinet to invoke the 25th?
So that body has never been set up by the Congress since the 25th Amendment was enacted back in 1967. My proposal has been to establish that body in case of an emergency, so that there's both the possibility of the cabinet acting, or if the cabinet is too much under the spell and control of the President, the body could act. Of course, the Vice President needs to be a willing partner in that as well. So none of this is a panacea.
In your perspective, what do you hope the party does? Do you think impeachment makes the most sense at the moment, or is that not the best strategy to you?
But the President having committed those offenses does not mean that we have the means to engage in the impeachment process. I mean, people have been asking for impeachment ever since Trump created DOGE and violated the rights of tens of thousands of federal workers, and that in itself, is another offense of immense gravity against the Constitution. But we are in the minority in the House, and we are in the minority in the Senate. So for people to say we should just go ahead and impeach him, simply denies this political reality. There is not a single Republican who has called for impeachment or indicated to us interest in impeachment at this point.
If you're in the minority, you also have to ask the additional question of whether you can find any members of the majority to act in a constitutionally patriotic way. So you know, there are a whole series of complicated legal and political and constitutional questions that need to be addressed. And we're dealing most recently with a crisis that occurred just a few days ago.
No. I mean, I learned a whole book of things, and I wrote a book that was partially about it, called Unthinkable if you want to get into more depth. But look, impeachment cannot be a political taboo for anybody. That is a surrender of a basic constitutional responsibility we have. At the same time, we have to recognize that impeachment is not a panacea in the constitution for what ails us, and the constitution cannot be a fetish either. It shouldn't be a taboo. It's got to be part of what constitutionally conscientious members are thinking about in the face of extraordinary misconduct and offenses taking place by the President of the United States.
Undoubtedly, in the sense that a lot more people are talking about the 25th Amendment, a lot more people are talking about impeachment, a lot more people are trying to scrutinize the Constitution to see whether there are answers to a lot of the questions that bedevil us right now. We're just getting back into session after the two week recess when the Republicans refused to come back earlier to discuss all of these things. And so I'm just opening up the conversation by setting forth or by setting the constitutional table, essentially.
Well, our constituents want us to be attending to the common good. We need to be delivering on health care to our people. We need to be promoting the rule of law for the country. We need to be preserving the peace and national security. In normal times, the President would be doing the President's job, which is taking care that the laws are faithfully executed. This President has been trampling the rule of law from day one. So do people want us to be holding the President accountable to his proper constitutional responsibilities? Absolutely. But more importantly, the people want us to be seeing that the laws that we pass are implemented faithfully by the President. So we need to hold the whole Administration accountable for its lawlessness and its corruption, and that's part of our basic responsibility. There's obviously tremendous anxiety in the country about the deranged conduct and behavior of the President, and we have to figure out, using the tools available to us, how to respond.
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