Rep. Jamie Raskin
2026 Commencement Speaker

Congressman Jamie Raskin represents Maryland’s 8th District in the U.S. House of Representatives and is the Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee.
Prior to his service in Congress, Rep. Raskin was a professor of constitutional law and the First Amendment at American University’s Washington College of Law for 25 years. He was also a three-term State Senator in Maryland, where he served as the Senate Majority Whip and led the breakthrough fights to pass marriage equality, abolish the death penalty, restore voting rights to former prisoners and pass the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
Elected to Congress the same night in 2016 Donald Trump was first elected president, Rep. Raskin has battled Trump’s authoritarian policies for many years. He was named the lead impeachment manager in the second impeachment trial of President Donald Trump in 2021 for inciting violent insurrection against the Constitution, a trial which ended in a 57-43 vote to convict, the most sweeping bipartisan margin for conviction in a presidential impeachment trial in American history but still ten votes short of the two-thirds vote threshold.
Rep. Raskin later served on the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol and delivered the Committee's referral to the Justice Department of the criminal offenses that Trump likely committed. Rep. Raskin then wrote a book about the devastating loss of his son Tommy, which took place at the time of these events, and the horrors of January 6th, as well as Trump's high crimes and misdemeanors and the impeachment process. The book, Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth and the Trials of American Democracy, became a New York Times #1 best-seller.
Rep. Raskin has authored several other books, including the Washington Post best-seller Overruling Democracy: The Supreme Court versus the American People and We the Students: Supreme Court Cases for and About America’s Students, which he wrote as the casebook for the Marshall-Brennan Constitutional Literacy Project.
Rep. Raskin’s book We the Students was banned by the Texas State Board of Education
and Rep. Raskin was banned for life from Russia by Vladimir Putin for his pro-Ukrainian
activities.
