Opinion: Five questions Elise Stefanik should answer

Editor’s note: Rep. Jamie Raskin represents Maryland’s 8th Congressional District and is the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight and Accountability Committee. A professor of constitutional law for 25 years at American University Washington College of Law, he was the lead impeachment manager in President Donald Trump’s second impeachment and a member of the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol. He is the author of several books, including “Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth and the Trials of American Democracy.” 

The following column is adapted from Raskin’s posts on the social media site X, formerly Twitter, that he addressed to GOP Rep. Elise Stefanik following her questioning of university presidents at a congressional hearing on antisemitism on college campuses. The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

Dear Rep. Stefanik:

Last week you challenged Ivy League presidents to denounce antisemitism with “moral clarity” by answering some yes/no questions. Dissatisfied with their answers, you have agitated for their removal. University of Pennsylvania President Liz Magill stepped down after fierce criticism of her testimony on Capitol Hill, while Harvard University President Claudine Gay and MIT President Sally Kornbluth have faced similar calls to resign for their own legalistic and tone-deaf answers to your questions about people “calling for the genocide of Jews.”

We can all agree that the college presidents who appeared before your committee failed basic tests of common sense and “moral clarity” when they struggled to answer your yes-no questions. But your sharply focused inquiry now invites a broader discussion about the moral responsibilities of leadership when confronting antisemitism. What do you think about tolerance for antisemitism by people who want to be president—not of a college in New England but of the United States itself?

Following your simple yes/no format, I present five easy questions for you to address with “moral clarity” on presidential tolerance for—and indeed active embrace of—antisemitism. (Please avoid all the waffling, evasion and equivocation you rightfully denounced in the college presidents.)

1. Is a candidate qualified to be president who hosted at his home for dinner Nick Fuentes, an avowedly pro-Hitler, Holocaust revisionist calling for a “holy war” against the Jewish people, and Kanye West, who vowed to go “death con 3” against Jews? Yes or no, Ms. Stefanik?

2. Will you support for president a candidate who proclaimed that there were “very fine people on both sides” of the antisemitic and racist riot that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017? Yes or no, Ms. Stefanik? To refresh your memory, this was the violence that began with neo-Nazis chanting “Jews will not replace us” outside a local synagogue and ended with the murder of Heather Heyer by a violent white supremacist in a car.

3. Would you support a presidential candidate whose final 2016 TV ad paired images of George Soros, Lloyd Blankfein and Janet Yellen, three prominent Jews, with voice-over about “global special interests” who “don’t have your good in mind”? Yes or no, Ms. Stefanik?

4. Do you regret endorsing Donald Trump for president in 2016 just days after he tweeted an image of the Star of David superimposed over Hillary Clinton’s face and a thick pile of cash? Yes or no, Ms. Stefanik?

5. Are you prepared to renounce the antisemitic “great replacement theory”—which you have previously dabbled in and echoed in campaigns—which inspired the perpetrators of Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, Buffalo, New York, supermarket and El Paso Walmart massacres? Yes or no, Ms. Stefanik?

Surely you have the “moral clarity” and ethical consistency to oppose antisemitism both on campus and in government. And surely you wouldn’t want people to believe that you only denounce antisemitism when it comes from outside your political party—would you?

I very much look forward to receiving your easy yes/no answers.

Very truly yours,

Jamie Raskin

(On Monday, Stefanik responded on X to Raskin, not specifically answering any of his five questions, but listing what she viewed as Trump’s accomplishments: “Thanks for asking @jamie_raskin, the answer is simple: President Trump was the best friend Jewish people have had in the White House in modern times.”)

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