MSNBC and other news outlets have been focusing on Donald Trump’s attempted insurrection and coup d’etat, and the liberal cable TV news channel’s presentation of Love & the Constitution is no exception. The eighty-nine-minute documentary zooms in on U.S. Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, who served as the lead impeachment manager of Trump’s second Senate trial and is a member of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the the U.S. Capitol (See The Progressive’s interview with Raskin: ‘We Should Be Expecting a Lot More of Democracy’.)
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U.S. Representative Jamie Raskin delivering a speech about the January 6 insurrection.
Love & the Constitution sometimes unspools more like a thriller than a documentary, as if it’s an extended segment of MSNBC programs such as Nicolle Wallace’s daily Dateline: White House, but with lots of exclusive behind-the-scenes footage, and minus an anchor.
Raskin, the nonfiction film’s focal point, serves as its de facto narrator. Reminiscent of a more disheveled version of Jimmy Stewart’s crusading senator in the 1939 classic Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Raskin is a compelling figure following in his father’s lefty footsteps. Marcus Raskin resigned as a National Security Council member after the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, co-founded the liberal-leaning think tank the Institute for Policy Studies and, along with prominent anti-Vietnam War protesters the Reverend William Sloane Coffin and Dr. Benjamin Spock, was one of the “Boston Five” eventually acquitted of aiding draft resisters.
As a longtime Constitutional law professor at American University in Washington, D.C., Jamie Raskin helps us place the attempted presidential putsch into Constitutional context. The fifty-nine-year-old father also emotes about the recent suicide of his son Tommy, buried just one day before the U.S. Capitol Building was sacked by would-be MAGA stormtroopers.
Love & the Constitution opens with Raskin ruminating about the twenty-five-year-old’s premature death, but the documentary doesn’t wallow in this private personal tragedy. Using extensive news clips and archival footage, plus expansive original interviews with Raskin, it flashes back to Trump’s ominous 2017 inaugural speech. With the benefit of hindsight, the Maryland Democrat acerbically quips: “ ‘American carnage’ wasn’t what he was running against, but what he was running for.”
Intercut with scenes of the Raskin family, often glimpsed walking their dog and at their Maryland home just outside of Washington, D.C., Love & the Constitution covers key events during Trump’s tumultuous presidency. After the Democrats regain control of the House in the 2018 midterm elections, Raskin proclaims it’s “an amazing feeling to be in the majority.” The Constitutional scholar later asserts: “Congress is not a co-equal branch of government—it is preeminent.”
The film recounts how Trump brought the federal government to a screeching halt with more than a month-long shutdown that began in December 2018 and continued into 2019. Reelected to serve his second term, Raskin thought this presidential buzzkill was intended to prevent the newly empowered House Democrats from asserting themselves as a viable opposition to Trump in the legislative branch. Although Trump eventually relented, the thirty-five day government shutdown—the longest in U.S. history—was a sign of things to come.
The February 27, 2019, Congressional testimony by Michael Cohen before the House Judiciary Committee (of which Raskin is a member) provides another red alert when Trump’s former attorney chillingly warns that if his ex-boss loses in 2020, “there will never be a peaceful transition of power.”
He got that right.
Love & the Constitution continues to walk us briskly through various milestones during the Trump era, including the Mueller Report on alleged Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
Raskin was on the House Judiciary Committee when Trump was first impeached in December 2019 over a contentious phone call with Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky. Hard on the heels of the Senate’s first failure to convict Trump, the pandemic strikes and Raskin confesses that the United States “came close to being a failed state.”
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"Love & the Constitution" will air on MSNBC on February 6.
As the 2020 presidential campaign raged amid Trump’s paranoid rantings about “rigged elections,” Love & the Constitution inexorably focuses on the violence of the January 6 insurrection. Raskin, his daughter Tabitha, and his son-in-law Hank (married to daughter Hannah)—all still mourning Tommy, whom they’d just buried—desperately seek shelter in the besieged Capitol.
The insurrection and ensuing second impeachment trial galvanized the grieving Congressman and empowered him to literally make the personal political. Tapped by Speaker Nancy Pelosi to be the House’s lead impeachment manager, Raskin rises to the occasion and displays Constitutional fortitude. His son may have died, but Raskin is determined to make sure that another one of his loves—the Constitution—shall not, as Lincoln put it, “perish from the Earth.”
Rather naively, though, the idealistic Congressman insists he expects a 100-0 vote against the man clearly responsible for instigating the rioters. As it was, with ten Republicans in the House voting to impeach the forty-fifth President, then seven GOP senators joining all fifty Democrats, the 57-43 vote to convict Trump in the Senate on February 13, 2021, was the most bipartisan vote in the history of U.S. presidential impeachment trials. But it did not meet the 60 vote threshold.
Raskin has been dubbed “Democracy’s Defender” by The New Republic and others, but like TNR, Love & the Constitution makes an unexamined assumption. To be sure, the United States has an electoral system—but this alone does not necessarily mean that the United States is truly a democracy where the majority rules. In the documentary, Raskin, who has written tomes such as 2003’s Overruling Democracy: The Supreme Court versus the American People, throws shade on the notion that America is actually a democracy
“The Constitution is not perfect,” and what the Founders paved the way for was “not a democracy” but “a slave republic,” Raskin points out. “We [that is, the people] don’t have a Constitutional right to vote” for the President, a process which is “just for Electors.” It will shock most citizens of the U.S.A.—you know, the ‘Undemocratic’ States of America—but ordinary people do not vote directly for President, per Article II, Section 1 of the Constitution. Raskin calls this cumbersome, undemocratic process “a creaky, antiquated Electoral College system.”
Unfortunately, the film never considers abolishing the Electoral College, nor does it delineate the political plotting by the GOP’s traitorous Trumpists inside of Congress itself that was one of the pivotal prongs of the scheme to prevent the certification of the Electoral College votes for President Joe Biden on January 6.
Nevertheless, Love & the Constitution is an engaging, gripping look at the life and turbulent times of the Congressmember who wears his heart upon his sleeve, mourning a son, yet still fighting to “form a more perfect union” that—hopefully—fulfills the promise of democracy.
Love & the Constitution debuts on MSNBC on February 6.