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Rep. Jamie Raskin Proves Democrats Won't Quit Going After Justice Clarence Thomas

Rebecca Downs
Rebecca Downs  |  January 01, 2024 4:30 PM

Democrats continue to remind us that they are after the U.S. Supreme Court, with conservative justices, especially Justice Clarence Thomas facing particularly vicious attacks. Last month, when Special Counsel Jack Smith had asked the Court to weigh in on whether former President Donald Trump had immunity, Democrats, including Senate Judiciary Chairman Dick Durbin (D-IL) didn't wait for the Court to even announce it was taking the case before they demanded Thomas recuse himself. The Court ended up not doing so at this time. During his Sunday appearance on CNN's "State of the Union," Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) made such a demand once more.

Raskin was asked directly by host Dana Bash if Thomas should recuse himself, emphasizing that point with an "absolutely." 

Prior to Bash's question was the congressman's claim that "I think anybody looking at this in any kind of dispassionate, reasonable way would say, if your wife was involved in the big lie and claiming that Donald Trump had actually won the presidential election and had been agitating for that and participating in the events leading up to January 6, that you shouldn't be participating in," with Raskin trailing off before recusal came up. He was referring to Thomas' wife, Ginni Thomas, who has also been a target of Democrats.

Not only did Raskin say that Thomas "should absolutely recuse himself," but he added "the question is, what do we do if he doesn't recuse himself?" Bash did not ask Raskin for follow up as to what he was implying, though the exchange got the attention of many X users.  "Jamie Raskin" and "Raskin" have both been trending on X since the segment. 

Bash and Raskin had been talking about Trump being disqualified from the ballot in Colorado and Maine, with Raskin claiming that "Donald Trump is clearly disqualified from being on the ballot because he participated in insurrection." The decisions came from the Colorado State Supreme Court and from the Secretary of State of Maine Shenna Lee Bellows, elected not by voters, but by the Democratic-controlled state legislature. She also has been quite cozy with President Joe Biden, which has been sharply criticized, as 2024 likely being a rematch from 2020 between Biden and Trump. 

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The segment moved on to discuss whether or not the Court would act on the matter. Raskin believes that they will, and do so quickly. He discussed non sequiturs about electability, such as age and citizenship requirements when it comes to running for president.

"I mean, under constitutional federalism, every state is ultimately going to control its own ballot access and access to candidates for the ballot. And that is obviously difficult when we're talking about electing the president, who is the one official we have got in America who is supposed to represent the entire country, represent everybody," he offered. "And so I think that the urgency is for the Supreme Court to act."

As Raskin continued, he brought up those other issues. "But I think it's going to be tough for some of them, if they want to keep Trump on the ballot, if they're falling for the argument that this is undemocratic. I mean, is it undemocratic that [former California Gov.] Arnold Schwarzenegger and [Secretary of Energy] Jennifer Granholm can't run for president because they weren't born in the country? If you think about it, of all the forms of disqualification we have, the one that disqualifies people for engaging in insurrection is the most democratic, because it's the one where people choose themselves to be disqualified," he added. "In terms of your age or where you were born, that's not up to you. But Donald Trump is in that tiny, tiny number of people who've essentially disqualified themselves."

Legal experts disagree with Raskin's assessment on Trump being "clearly disqualified." This includes Alan Dershowitz, who actually taught Raskin at Harvard Law School, and who has singled out the congressman as being wrong on this matter. 

Bash brought up none of this, though. In fact, she even referred to Raskin as "a constitutional scholar" when asking about making Trump into a martyr. 

"If he loses, he will feel himself a martyr there, and he will try to overturn the election result again. So I don't think we can run scared from Donald Trump. We have got to enforce our Constitution. And that certainly was the design of the framers, and that's what they would have us do," Raskin responded in part.

On this too there was missing context that Bash could have brought up, in that Raskin objected to the 2016 presidential election results, and even bragged about it via his official website.