Meet Jamie
Jamie has represented Maryland’s 8th District (Montgomery, Frederick and Carroll Counties) since he ran for Congress in 2016 and prevailed, after being outspent 9-1, in what was then the most expensive primary election in American history. Before taking office in January of 2017, he was a professor of constitutional law at American University’s Washington College of Law, where he launched the Marshall-Brennan Constitutional Literacy Project, and a three-term Democratic State Senator from District 20 (Silver Spring and Takoma Park). As Majority Whip of the Maryland Senate, Jamie became famous for building bipartisan coalitions and leading complex floor fights to pass marriage equality, abolish the death penalty, enact tough anti-drunk driving laws, adopt the first National Popular Vote measure in America, allow for direct wine shipment, create a medical cannabis program, and pass the world’s first Benefit Corporation law. He was recognized by the Maryland Gazette of Politics and Business as one of the state’s top ten “Most Effective Legislators” and by the Silver Spring Voice as “Montgomery County’s Most Responsive Elected Official.”
Elected to Congress the same night Donald Trump won the presidency, Jamie went to work immediately to rally the Democrats nationally and, as a Member of the House Judiciary, Oversight and Reform, Rules and House Administration Committees, to oppose the startling corruption and extremism of the Trump Administration.
When Democrats recaptured the House majority in 2018, Oversight Committee Chairman Elijah Cummings appointed Jamie Chair of the Oversight Subcommittee on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, a position from which he proceeded to zealously defend voting rights, free speech, the rights of labor and working people and reproductive freedom and the rights of women. Jamie also was named to the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus and pressed hard for a nationwide strategy to crush the virus, the strategy never offered by the Trump administration.
In the aftermath of January 6, 2021, when Donald Trump incited violent insurrection and attempted a political coup to block the counting of electoral college votes in a bid to seize the presidency and prevent the peaceful transfer of power, Jamie drafted an impeachment article against Trump with his colleagues Ted Lieu, Joe Neguse and David Cicciline. After the House vote to impeach Trump by 232-197, Speaker Nancy Pelosi asked Jamie to become the lead impeachment manager in Trump’s second Senate impeachment trial, which resulted in a 57–43 vote to convict, the most sweeping bipartisan vote to convict a president in our history but still ten votes shy of the two-thirds majority needed to convict. After the trial, Speaker Pelosi named Jamie a member of the new Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol.
Jamie is currently the Vice-Chair of Organizing for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the founder and leader of Democracy Summer, the Democrats’ nationwide program to engage young people in training for political activism and leadership.
As a law professor and political leader, Jamie has written several books, including We the Students: Supreme Court Cases for and about Students and Overruling Democracy: The Supreme Court vs. the American People. His most recent book, Unthinkable: Trauma,
Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy addressed the catastrophic loss of Jamie’s son Tommy, the events of January 6 and Donald Trump’s Senate impeachment trial; it received critical acclaim, topping several bestseller lists including the New York Times and the Washington Post.
Jamie graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Harvard Law Review and where he met his wife Sarah. They are the parents of three children, Hannah Grace, Thomas Bloom (1995–2020), and Tabitha Claire. They live in Takoma Park with their dogs Toby and Potter.
