By Jamie Raskin
Democratic Candidate
I am running for Congress to restore the ailing physical infrastructure of America — the roads and highways and bridges, the Metro system, the water systems, the ports, cybersecurity, the nation’s grid. But also our environmental infrastructure: our destabilized climate system, our forests, our declining biodiversity, our oceans and waterways, the air we breathe, the water we drink. I am calling for a “Green Deal” for America, a massive reinvestment in our national infrastructure in a way that advances our urgent environmental goals and addresses the civilizational crisis of climate change.
But we must simultaneously renew the eroding social infrastructure of America. It is high time we close the outrageous income and wealth gaps that undermine social cohesion and damage public mental and physical health. This means increasing the minimum wage, restoring the right to organize and to engage in collective bargaining, and reviving progressivity and fairness in our plutocratic tax code. It also means placing both universal pre-K and college affordability for all high up on the public agenda. We should be finding ways to encourage business entrepreneurship, artistic creativity, public service, and community organizing among millions of college students, not saddling them with staggering debts that sap their energy and hamper their ability to own and rent homes and launch their careers. We need to defend and strengthen Social Security and Medicare and liberate small businesses from the burden of soaring health insurance costs by moving to a single-payer system universal health care system. And we need to advance public safety and health by imposing a universal background check on all firearm purchases and closing the Internet and gun-show loopholes.
To restore the physical and social infrastructure of America, we need to revive our political infrastructure. This means protecting and securing the right of all Americans to vote; ending gerrymandering which permits politicians to choose voters before voters choose politicians; overturning Citizens United, the egregious 5-4 Supreme Court decision which defined corporations as rights-bearing democratic citizens and gave CEOs the power to spend corporate treasury wealth on political campaigns; enacting small-donor public financing to propel new voices and new choices in our politics; and building pathways for constructive bipartisanship on key issues, such as infrastructure, criminal justice reform, immigration policy reform, and fiscal transparency and prudence.
What makes me think that, at a time of division and polarization, I can be part of a successful movement for democratic renewal and social progress in America?
It is the fact that I have been part of such a movement in Maryland.
For the last 10 years, I have been a Maryland state senator representing Silver Spring and Takoma Park (District 20) and I have seen democracy function for our people. I have helped make government work.
The General Assembly has enacted more than 120 of the bills I introduced, the vast majority passing with bipartisan support. I sponsored and led the Senate floor fight to pass marriage equality, to abolish the death penalty, to pass Noah’s law to compel all convicted drunk drivers to have ignition interlock devices installed in their cars; to ban military-style assault weapons, to restore voting rights to former prisoners, to reform mandatory minimum sentences in drug cases, to pass the National Popular Vote plan, to enact a medical marijuana program, to pass the Green Maryland Act and adopt a strong renewable energy plan to dramatically lower greenhouse gas emissions, to lower the voter registration age to 16, and to pass the Maryland Farm-to-Schools Act. I have participated in thrilling breakthrough victories in perhaps the most legislatively productive decade in the history of our state.
My professional career has prepared me to be an effective legislative actor. I have been a professor of constitutional law at American University’s Washington College of Law (WCL) for 26 years. I have also served as a Senior Fellow at People for the American Way fighting for the common good and the civil liberties and rights of the people. In the Maryland Senate, I’m Majority Whip and serve on the Judicial Proceedings Committee and as chair of the Executive Nominations Committee and the Joint Committee on Legislative Ethics. At WCL, I’m director of the Program on Law and Government and founded our Marshall-Brennan Constitutional Literacy Project, which sends law students nationwide into public high schools to teach students about the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. The program is now at 20 law schools across America.
I want to put my demonstrably effective parliamentary skills, political leadership, coalition-building experience and constitutional knowledge to work for a revival of bipartisan progress in Congress and America.
But of all the experiences I have had in politics so far, none has been more meaningful to me than rendering effective constituent service to the people I represent. I was named the “most responsive” elected official in Montgomery County by the Silver Spring Voice and I have prided myself on responding to people on the same day that they get in touch with me. My door is always open and I regard myself as the champion of the needs and interests of all my constituents — Democrats, Republicans, Independents, Greens and Libertarians. Whatever your party affiliation, I hope that you will call upon me when necessary if I am lucky enough to serve the 8th Congressional District as your representative.