Tenure
As one of his first actions in Congress, Raskin and several other members of the House objected to the certification of the 2016 United States presidential election in favor of Donald Trump due to alleged ties with Russia, and Russia's interference in the 2016 election, as well as voter suppression efforts. Then-Vice President Joe Biden ruled their objection out of order because it had to be sponsored by at least one member of each chamber, and it had no Senate sponsor. Raskin questioned the legitimacy of the election, calling it tainted by Russian cyber-sabotage and by Republican voter suppression in several swing states.
In April 2018, Raskin, Jared Huffman, Jerry McNerney, and Dan Kildee launched the Congressional Freethought Caucus. Its stated goals include "pushing public policy formed on the basis of reason, science, and moral values", promoting the "separation of church and state", and opposing discrimination against "atheists, agnostics, humanists, seekers, religious, and nonreligious persons". Huffman and Raskin are co-chairs. Huffman and Raskin both received the Religious Liberty Award from the American Humanist Association in 2024.
On January 12, 2021, Raskin was named the lead impeachment manager for the Senate impeachment trial held after Trump's second impeachment. He was the primary author of the impeachment article, along with Representatives David Cicilline and Ted Lieu, which charged Trump with inciting an insurrection on the United States Capitol. During the Senate trial, Raskin recounted that after being there on January 6 as the mob was forcibly entering, his daughter said to him, "Dad, I don't want to come back to the Capitol".
In February 2022, while his wife was under consideration for a position as the Federal Reserve's vice chair of supervision, it was reported that Raskin violated the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act by failing to properly disclose her share dealings. One instance was when his wife received stock for advising a Colorado-based financial technology trust company, and the other was when she sold stock in Reserve Trust for $1.5 million, but the sale was not disclosed for eight months. His wife had sat on the advisory board of the Federal Reserve when it "granted Reserve Trust unusual access to its master account", but it is not clear when she first acquired the shares.
In February 2022, while his wife was under consideration for a position as the Federal Reserve's vice chair of supervision, it was reported that Raskin violated the Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act by failing to properly disclose her share dealings. One instance was when his wife received stock for advising Reserve Trust, a Colorado-based financial technology trust company, and the other was her sale of that stock for $1.5 million, which was not disclosed for eight months. Reserve Trust was reported to have obtained unusual access to a Federal Reserve master account, although it was not clear when Bloom Raskin first acquired the shares.
On July 1, 2021, Raskin was one of seven Democrats appointed to the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 Capitol attack by Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Following the announcement, Raskin said, "As Chair of the Oversight Committee's Civil Rights and Civil Liberties Subcommittee, I've helped lead the Oversight Committee's painstaking investigation into violent white supremacy over the last two years. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has declared domestic violent extremism the number one security threat in the country. We saw that threat explode right in front of our eyes at the Capitol on January 6."
On July 12, 2022, Raskin co-led the Select Committee's seventh public hearing with Representative Stephanie Murphy. The hearing focused on the role the far-right extremist groups Proud Boys and Oath Keepers played in organizing the attack. It also discussed the importance of Trump's December 19 tweet "Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!" and how it spread to his supporters. To show the impact, the committee played recordings of its interview with an anonymous Twitter employee who worked from 2020 to 2021 and was on the team responsible for the platform's content moderation policies. During the interview, they said that the tweet served as a "call to action, and in some cases as a call to arms" to his supporters.
In his closing statement at the July 12 hearing, Raskin said Trump had become the first president to summon a crowd to the capital to block the constitutional transfer of power, and argued that Trump had sent an angry and armed crowd to the Capitol knowing what it was.
Raskin was nominated for the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize for his "defense of freedom and democracy," along with the other members of the January 6th Committee.
In the final hours of his presidency on January 20, 2025, President Joe Biden issued preemptive pardons to the members and staff of the January 6 select committee, including Raskin as well as to the Capitol and D.C. police officers who had testified before the panel. Raskin, who learned of the pardon from reporters on the morning of the inauguration, called it "a sign of our strange times" that public servants had to be pardoned for doing their jobs.
In December 2024, Raskin gave up his position atop the Oversight Committee to challenge Jerry Nadler, who had led Judiciary Committee Democrats since 2017, for the panel's ranking member post. Nadler withdrew from the race days later and endorsed Raskin, and on December 18, 2024, Raskin was elected ranking member by the House Democratic Caucus after being recommended by its Steering and Policy Committee. He took up the role at the beginnning of the 119th Congress.
