He was done with chemotherapy and finally water didn’t taste like metal. His energy levels were up, his color was back, his appetite and taste buds returned — “food is really good. Food is really, really good!” Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.) remembers telling his family at the dinner table when it hit him.
But just days after Raskin, 60, rang the bell at MedStar Georgetown University Hospital, celebrating the end of his cancer treatment, his phone started buzzing and ringing. Emails and text messages seemed to all be confronting Raskin with one big decision that, as he tried to get through chemo, he said, had not crossed his mind.
Was he going to run for U.S. Senate?
“I felt like Rip Van Winkle waking up from a very long sleep — you know, in a political sense,” Raskin said of the bombardment of interest in his political future, just as he was taking stock of surviving cancer and appreciating not having to force himself to eat meals anymore.
For Raskin, once again a major inflection point in his career coincided with a major personal trial. Over the past two years, he has both mourned his son, Tommy, and confronted his own mortality, in each case while serving in some of the most demanding leadership positions in Congress — the sort of indefatigability and “clarity of purpose,” as one Democrat put it, that has become part of Raskin’s identity.
The life-altering collisions had rolled in like one-two punches. Six days after Tommy died by suicide, Raskin returned to work at the Capitol only to flee a mob of pro-Trump rioters on Jan. 6, 2021, galvanizing Raskin to lead House Democrats’ impeachment charge. In December, six days after being voted the top Democrat on the powerful House Oversight Committee, he announced he was diagnosed with diffuse large B-cell lymphoma. He scheduled chemo on weekends and during stretches when the House was out of session, assuring colleagues he was not going anywhere.
Now on the heels of recovery, the question weighing on Raskin, and on the lips of virtually every Maryland politico, is where he will steer his own political future next, following the announcement by Sen. Ben Cardin (D-Md.) that he won’t seek reelection in 2024. As of that moment — May 24 at 2 p.m. in Raskin’s office, just before a post-chemo virtual checkup with his doctor — not even Raskin appeared to know what path he was leaning toward. “You’re catching me in the middle of a bit of an existential crisis here,” he said, wearing the trademark bandanna gifted to him as a hand-me-down from rocker Steve Van Zandt.
For Raskin, the timing of the decision felt a little surreal, as if being pressed to book his next plane ticket right after returning from an exhausting trip.
“There’s an essay I read by Susan Sontag where she says that everybody’s born with two passports, a passport to the land of the well and a passport to the land of the ill,” Raskin said. “And we hope to be using just one passport. But over the course of our lives, everybody is going to use both of them. And it’s interesting because I didn’t leave the 8th District or Washington once — I was here the whole time. But when they told me that I was cancer-free, I felt like I had just returned from a foreign land. I felt like I’d been gone even though I hadn’t been anywhere.”
Raskin had used that other passport before. He beat colon cancer while serving in the Maryland state Senate; he had been diagnosed in 2010.
It was a similar story: Raskin not receding onto the sidelines to take it easy but seeming almost to double down instead. At the time, the debate over legalizing same-sex marriage in Maryland was raging in Annapolis. Raskin had made promises to fight for marriage equality central to his first campaign for the Senate in 2006, and now that the moment was here, Raskin couldn’t miss it. He led the floor debate for Senate Democrats while wearing a pump as he went through treatment. Some colleagues joked to him that he was drumming up sympathy to get votes for his cause. They had a point, he said.
“I could have skipped it and let somebody else do it. But I was so into this moment,” Raskin said.
Former Maryland governor Larry Hogan (R) could relate. He was diagnosed in 2015 with the same form of lymphoma that Raskin had just five months after he was elected governor. He called the congressman just after Raskin’s diagnosis in December to talk to him about it, reminding him to take it easy, to listen to doctors, to lean on his family. “While we disagree on a lot of things politically, it was a human-to-human connection — we’re unfortunately part of the same club that neither one of us intended to join,” Hogan said.
But if Raskin was taking it easy, no one seemed to notice.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Raskin’s No. 2 on the House Oversight Committee, said that after Raskin’s diagnosis she offered to take on whatever he needed. But Raskin rarely asked for anything, she said. He never missed a vote. He showed up to preside as ranking Democrat at virtually every House Oversight hearing, and prepared with precision counterarguments against Oversight Republicans’ investigations into President Biden or his family. Ocasio-Cortez filled in for him, from what she recalls, one time to debate against a Republican bill on the House floor. When he didn’t go to the D.C. jail as a Democratic representative on Republicans’ tour to check on Jan. 6 riot suspects — not a place for a weak immune system — he called before, checked in during and called afterward, as if he were there anyway, said Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Tex.).
“The entire time he served as ranking member, this is someone who has been battling one of the worst diseases we know of in this world, and he’s still been one of the best and strongest leaders we have, and I think a lot of it has to do with who he is as a person,” Crockett said.
Ocasio-Cortez said she didn’t get the sense Raskin was persisting “despite what’s happening” — but almost “because of what’s happening, because of all this adversity.” “I don’t think a person could do this if it wasn’t about something bigger than one’s self,” she said of Raskin’s persistence.
Multiple Oversight colleagues said that often, the only reminders that Raskin had cancer were the bandannas he wore each day, his face sometimes appearing a little paler than usual, and his always masking. Rep. Maxwell Frost (D-Fla.), at 26 the youngest member of Congress, said sometimes it could be easy to forget what Raskin was going through — because he was the one giving Democrats pep talks. “It seems like with everything that life might throw at Jamie Raskin, he takes it up on his mantle of fighting for the world he believes in,” said Frost, who considers Raskin a mentor.
The support for Raskin crossed party lines, with even Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) — Raskin’s political foil on the Oversight Committee in every sense — sending him a tweet of well wishes.
“When he was diagnosed I prayed for him — I still pray for him,” said Rep. Tim Burchett (R-Tenn.). “I try to remember him in my prayers morning and night, sometimes during the day, because I know he’s hurting.”
Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) said she was struck by how present Raskin was throughout his chemotherapy, and how every time she has seen him, he has exuded “so much energy and has stayed so positive,” which she said she found inspiring.
“I don’t know how he did it,” said Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.) of Raskin’s ability to go through chemo while leading Democrats on one of Congress’s most high-profile committees. “I honestly don’t, because when he was first diagnosed, I know many of us just thought, ‘How is he going to be able to find the strength to do both?’ But he did.”
Raskin said he never considered stepping down from his role as ranking Democrat after receiving the diagnosis, feeling best when he was on the committee “clashing with the MAGA Republicans” rather than lying in bed at home focused on his symptoms. He despaired, a little, at first about how he would make it work. But after his first chemotherapy appointment, the lump on his neck that led Raskin to see a doctor in the first place was gone by the end of the day. He was taken with a sense of optimism, which came and went as the chemo dragged on. “I mean, there were really times when it just seemed eternal, like it was never going to end, you know?” Raskin said. “Chemo is a tough process. I would not wish it on my worst political enemies in the world.”
But the thing about using that other passport, Raskin said, is it shifts perspective. He wasn’t feeling fear, at least “not as a primary emotion,” after his diagnosis — the worst had already happened to him when he lost Tommy. Instead he felt himself wanting to live up to the wishes Tommy left in his final note — to take care of each other and the animals and global poor — with even more vigor.
“It made me realize how much I have to live for,” Raskin said. “That’s why Tommy’s note is so important to me. Because when you lose someone who’s so fundamental in your life, like Tommy is to us, you can feel as if you’ve lost everything. But Sarah and I have our daughters and we have lots of other wonderful kids in our family and …” His chin quivered. “We have lots of things we have to live for. So … forgive me. So it increased my resolve to live.”
In his office that Wednesday, Raskin picked up a stack of handwritten letters and cards waiting for him on his desk — “today’s mail,” he notes. He tries to read 25 each day, and to eventually respond to each one.
Supporters from across the country write to him to tell them about their own cancer experiences, to empathize, sometimes sending him packages of bandannas or other cancer headgear — his hair hasn’t yet returned. “And here’s a flag one. This is awesome — I love these,” he said, pulling the newest bandanna out of a package. Sometimes the fans tell him what they think he should do in the future — run for president, return to teaching law, how about the Senate? — and it gets Raskin thinking.
He’s been making a mental list of pros and cons, going back and forth. On the one hand, if he stays in the House, he’ll have the gavel on the House Oversight Committee if Democrats win control: He could be an agenda-setter. On the other hand, if he goes to the Senate, he’ll have a say in judicial nominations: “The Supreme Court is something very important to me.” But he’ll lose his seniority, and part of him feels invested in the class of freshman Democrats serving with him on Oversight.
“The large context has got to be the defense of American democracy and freedom,” he said. “I mean, that is the work that we are engaged in, and all of us are part of it. And I just need to figure out where my experience and talents are best deployed in that struggle.”
It was hard to tell where his personal well-being fit in that context, largely absent from Raskin’s top-of-mind factors. Raskin said he was feeling well. The cancer was gone, doctors gave a prognosis that it very probably would not return, and he wasn’t on medication. But still, he was just waking up, just adjusting to existing, he said, in a world where food tastes good and his nerves aren’t tingling.
“You know, I’ve only run for two offices, state Senate and U.S. House, and in both cases, I knew exactly what I wanted to do, and there was no question about it,” Raskin said. “And now suddenly I’m in a situation where I really am not sure.”
He had a decision to make between two good options, he said — and at least whatever he decided, he would be traveling somewhere he wanted to go.
