I think most of us would agree that the United States House of Representatives has more than its fair share of nitwits and ne’er-do-wells. Until he left Congress in 2022 to run, unsuccessfully, for Texas attorney general, U.S. Rep. Louie Gohmert enjoyed the sobriquet, “Dumbest Guy in Congress.” Now that Gohmert has left Washington to become the Dumbest Guy in Texas, Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene may be ready to assume his mantle of imbecility.
Ms. Greene is well qualified for that position, since she not only believes that nonexistent Jewish space lasers cause natural disasters but that Hillary Clinton sex-traffics and cannibalizes children in the basement of a D.C. pizzeria. More recently, MTG has been hard at work trying to defund PBS, because as everybody knows, Big Bird is a DEI-loving agent provocateur for the radical left who has spent an entire career grooming America’s children to become woke, tree-hugging communists. And let’s not even mention NATO-embracing Rick Steves.
New York Rep. George “Pinocchio” Santos spent every minute of his single term in Congress lying his head off, and Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan got plenty of exercise over the past four years jumping up and down, waving his arms, and screaming like a banshee about Hunter Biden’s nefarious activities abroad, except that, oops, the allegations were based exclusively on a fiction peddled by a KGB plant. Their colleague from South Carolina, Nancy Mace, is currently distinguishing herself as a champion of equal rights and human dignity by bullying and harassing the first transgender member of Congress, and let’s not forget to include Colorado Rep. Lauren Bobert, whose public behaviors have distinguished her as a trashy twit.
Clearly, no one will ever mistake a session of Congress for a Mensa meeting.
And yet…
Once in a while, a benevolent universe takes pity on all of us and sends someone to the unruly chamber who is the polar opposite of that collection of rip-off artists, liars, cowards, creeps, and fools. Once in a while, the universe takes pity on us and sends us Jamie Raskin.
Jamie Raskin is what my mother would have referred to as “a real mensch.” “Mensch” has the same meaning in German as in Yiddish; narrowly and literally defined, “mensch” means “man,” but it can be broadly construed to mean “person” or “human being.” Symbolically, Jews in particular construe the word “mensch” not only to mean a really, really good human being but to be a really, really good human being who has a natural sense of humility.
Jamie Raskin is a real mensch. He is descended from Russian Jews who fled their repressive, antisemitic homeland and emigrated to America, the land of opportunity. Maryland Rep. Raskin attended Harvard University, where he edited the Law Review and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law. He taught constitutional law at American University for 25 years, and he considers himself a constitutionalist, a humanist, and a political progressive. Raskin has served as a congressman from his home district in Maryland since 2016, one of the most consequential years for America in the history of our republic. When opponents suggested that Raskin’s views were too far left of center, he retorted, “My ambition is not to be in the political center, it is to be in the moral center.”
And indeed, Jamie Raskin has staked out some significant territory in the moral center: He led the fight to legalize same-sex marriage; he sponsored the first-ever bill to end the electoral college as the determiner of who becomes president, in favor of the far more equitable popular vote; he has worked to end the death penalty; he recognized and became a vocal part of the congressional early warning system that alerted us to Vladimir Putin’s interference in our American elections; and Raskin was a founder of the Congressional Freethought Caucus, the stated mission of which is to promote the separation of church and state and oppose discrimination based on the religious beliefs—or lack thereof—of any group or individual.
Rep. Raskin was one of the chief authors of the articles of impeachment that led to Donald Trump’s second Senate trial for high crimes and misdemeanors, after Trump incited an insurrection at the Capitol to prevent the lawful certification of electoral results, and Raskin was the lead impeachment manager for the Senate trial itself. He was articulate, passionate, informed, and correct in his assertion that Donald Trump should be convicted of his crimes against the nation.
Thanks to one of the most craven individuals to ever hold power in the Senate—Mitch McConnell—Trump escaped a well-deserved conviction and went on to become the biggest criminal ever elected president. Twice.
Following that monumental Republican betrayal of the Constitution and rule of law, Raskin was one of seven Democrats appointed to the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack. Raskin was nominated, subsequently, for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize for his “defense of freedom and democracy,” along with the other members of the January 6 Committee. The nomination was well deserved.
As one would expect of Real Mensch Raskin, he is now hard at work as one of the leaders of the resistance to Donald Trump’s efforts to turn our democracy into a dictatorship. Unlike some of his less dynamic colleagues (Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer comes to mind), he is leading rallies, railing against the cascade of injustices pouring forth from the White House and exercising his power as a member of a coequal branch of government. He appears frequently on television as both a constitutional scholar and a principled legislator who refuses to capitulate to the fever dream of Donald Trump and the Heritage Foundation.
A tragically compelling part of Rep. Raskin’s story is the death of his beloved son Tommy, by suicide, one week before the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol. Tommy was buried on January 5, 2020. One day later, Raskin, steeped in his own grief, made his way to the Capitol, understanding that what should have been a completely pro forma function of Congress—the certification of an election—was going to become a three-ring circus as grand-standing colleagues across the aisle prepared to stonewall the process.
The circus was predictable and inevitable, but what happened next went far beyond what anyone expected: Donald Trump unleashed a crazed, brainwashed paramilitary mob to seize control of the government by force. There is a name for such an occurrence: an attempted coup.
Raskin, one of whose daughters had accompanied him to the Capitol that day for what should have been an entirely benign, ceremonial event, now had to fear for her safety—just one day after burying his son.
As if these sadnesses and traumas were not quite enough, in 2022 Rep. Raskin was diagnosed with lymphoma. As he was undergoing chemotherapy, Raskin experienced a common side-effect: hair loss. In response, a number of MAGA colleagues in Congress, along with all of the notable humanitarians at Fox News, decided that the most compassionate response to Raskin’s cancer was to mock him for wearing a bandana to cover his bald head.
And just to be clear, there is nothing less mensch-like than making fun of someone who is experiencing the horrible side effects of cancer treatments.
When I think of Jamie Raskin, I am reminded of “The Last of the Just,” a novel written following the Holocaust by the French author Andre Schwarz-Bart. Without delving too deeply into the plot of the novel, the overarching theme is based on the Hasidic belief that there are 36 just, or righteous, men inhabiting the planet at any given time who are unknown to anyone, including themselves. They are no more aware of their exceptional goodness than is anyone else. In Hebrew, they are referred to as the “Lahmehd Vov,” and more familiarly as “Lahmehd Vovniks.”
But God knows. God knows who they are, and because of the existence of these 36 just individuals, God makes a conscious decision, every day, not to destroy all humanity in utter despair. Each of the 36 righteous individuals is the living embodiment of a real mensch and provides just a glimmer of hope to God that maybe, just maybe, we might someday prove that we are not quite the failed experiment that we often seem to be, and maybe, just maybe, worth saving.
I could have written today about the spectacle of a deranged billionaire wearing a plastic wedge of cheese on his head while attempting to buy an election in Wisconsin. I could have written about a medical moron who heads the Department of Health and Human Services hiring a charlatan to “prove” the lie that vaccines cause autism. I could have written today about the massive human rights violations, and violations of our own rule of law, being committed by Donald Trump’s entire administration, or the insane suggestion that the Danes will be happy to give away their sovereign territory of Greenland to our mentally ill PINO, or any of the other demoralizing, disgusting, and downright terrifying things that Trump 2.0 is doing to our country.
There is no lack of material these days for an essayist who writes about national politics, but for today—and going forward, once per month—I am going to focus not just on what is wrong with our government, but what is right with our government. I am going on a hunt for the Lahmehd Vovniks—the 36 righteous legislators—in Congress.
Jamie Raskin is one. He stands as a rebuke to the evil, the rapacity, the grift, the graft, and the moral bankruptcy of our current administration. And, if we ever, miraculously, have another free and fair election, I hope like hell that he will run for president.
