Grieving Son’s Death, Maryland Lawmaker Fights to Impeach Trump

To that, Mr. Raskin has a short answer, and a long one. First, the short answer: “The people who are saying why impeach now really should be asking: Why does he continue to commit impeachable offenses up until the very end of his term?”

The long one, which Mr. Raskin, who has written two books on Supreme Court cases, intends to deliver Wednesday on the House floor, begins this way: “We came very close to experiencing a coup in America. It was like an attempted coup wrapped inside a violent riot wrapped inside some cosmetic protests on the outside.”

He went on: “And the president gave all kinds of aid, comfort and exhortation to the mob. That is intolerable. It takes us in a profoundly dangerous direction as a society. America is a country built on common sense. And we have to use our common sense now to recognize a lethal danger to our people, our Congress, our leaders and the whole nation. This president is a clear and present danger to our country.”

Mr. Raskin, 58, is an instantly recognizable figure in the Capitol; he was once described as looking like a mad scientist, though he began slicking his hair down after that. He has an infectious enthusiasm for the Constitution and American history. He has been steeped in liberal activism since he was a toddler.

His father, Marcus Raskin, who died in 2017, was an aide to President John F. Kennedy and a vehement opponent of the Vietnam War. In 1970, the elder Mr. Raskin received part of the Pentagon Papers, the classified study of American decision making in Vietnam, from its author, Daniel Ellsberg, and helped get them to the reporter Neil Sheehan of The New York Times.

The younger Mr. Raskin keeps a 1964 clipping from The Washington Post with a photo of him as a 2-year-old toting a placard at a protest. When he was 6, his father took him to the first Freedom Seder, a Passover meal that brought Jewish and Black people together a year after the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Thomas Bloom Raskin, named for the Revolutionary War figure Thomas Paine, was an heir to this legacy. He was the only son and second child of Mr. Raskin and his wife, Sarah Bloom Raskin, a deputy treasury secretary under President Barack Obama and former member of the Federal Reserve Board. They also have two daughters, Tabitha, 23 and Hannah, 28.