WASHINGTON — In the spring of 2023, a most unlikely friendship took root after a House Oversight Committee hearing ended and members chatted before hurrying off for a two-week congressional recess.

Colorado Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert, a conservative firebrand and one of President Donald Trump’s top supporters, told Montgomery County Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin, a liberal darling who is Boebert’s political opposite, that she was excitedly awaiting the birth of her first grandson in several weeks.

Raskin was enduring chemotherapy for a serious form of cancer and confided that he hoped to be around long enough to become a grandparent himself one day.

She comforted him. Something passed between them.

In the months following that tearful conversation two years ago, Raskin, 62, and Boebert, 38, quietly developed a friendship built on the belief that people aren’t wholly defined by their politics, even in this polarized era. They are close enough that Boebert, her mother, four sons and grandson joined Raskin and his family at his house last New Year’s Eve for an evening of Chinese food, conversation and games.

‘Diverse perspectives that allow us to be wiser’

Their relationship may surprise an untold number of Americans who consider rival party members abhorrent — or at least believe their values would be compromised by befriending somebody with radically different views.

Said Boebert: “He was being very vulnerable with his condition. We kind of talked and shared some teary eyes together.”

Said Raskin: “Some people think that we have two completely divided and unbridgeable Americas, and I don’t want to believe that, and I don’t want us ever to see a Civil War in America. You’ve got to follow Lincoln and say, ‘We must not be enemies …’”

Such across-the-aisle friendships are uncommon at a time in which politics is intensely personal and voters often define one another according to whether or not they support Trump, a Republican who won a second term last year.

Republicans call the rival party “Dumbocrats” and worse, and Democratic voters have been known to purge Trump backers from their social media followers because they consider the president’s views extreme and hateful.

The “us-versus-them” mentality “has reached a level of amplification that nobody has seen before,” said Todd Kashdan, a George Mason University psychology professor studying ways to reduce political polarization.

The danger, Kashdan said, is missing out on “diverse perspectives that allow us to be wiser even if you disagree vehemently with the person.”

‘There’s a tender spot there’

Raskin and Boebert acknowledge their friendship may seem unorthodox, if not offensive, to some in their respective parties.

“People say, ‘Why don’t you guys have bipartisan friendships?’” Raskin told The Baltimore Sun during an interview late last month at the Capitol.

“I tell people who my bipartisan friends are and then they express horror. I mean, who do you want me to be friends with? Abraham Lincoln is no longer in the House of Representatives,” he said.

Boebert, who was interviewed from her Colorado district by phone, said she gets “chastised for being partisan and bipartisan. So, you know, there’s no way to make everyone happy.”

Boebert took a political risk by referencing the friendship during a 2024 Republican primary election forum in her Colorado district. She had moved to the solidly Trump-supporting district to avoid a difficult reelection challenge in her previous district. She won a third congressional term.

Seated side by side at a long table, the nine GOP candidates were asked by the moderator: “Name a Democrat you respect and can work with.”

There were pauses as most of the candidates struggled to come up with names.

Boebert mentioned Colorado’s two Democratic U.S. senators before naming “one that no one would expect — a Democrat that I have many deep conversations, family conversations with — Jamie Raskin.”

There was a palpable buzz in the room and an audience member said, “Ohhhh.”

“ I know, I get it,” Boebert said. She emphasized that she didn’t agree with Raskin on policy. “But on a personal, family level, there’s a tender spot there, and l’ve had some very precious conversations with him.”

‘I like bringing people together’

In their political lives, Raskin and Boebert are unapologetically partisan.

Boebert, who formerly owned a gun-themed restaurant called “Shooters,” is known for her gun rights advocacy. She opposes abortion, voted against certifying the results of the 2020 election that Trump calls rigged and initiated impeachment proceedings against Democratic President Joe Biden in 2023 over southern border issues. She and Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene interrupted and heckled Biden’s 2022 State of the Union speech.

Raskin, who favors an assault weapons ban and abortion rights, was a prominent member of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters seeking to block the 2020 presidential election results. The ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, he is a leader of his party’s Trump resistance efforts and has said at rallies: “A rally a day keeps the fascists away.” He was the Democrats’ manager during the 2021 Trump impeachment proceedings, during which he gave an emotional speech referencing his 25-year-old son, Tommy, who had taken his own life weeks earlier on New Year’s Eve.

But a part of Raskin embraces expanding his circle. “I’m a middle child and I like bringing people together,” he said.

He said of Boebert: “There’s a live intelligence there and she’s not completely ideologically frozen. Having said that, her politics are obviously pretty much diametrically opposed to my own.”

Raskin helped Boebert this year with a bill — it recently passed the House — to provide more communities with their own ZIP codes to help them with mail delivery and collecting taxes.

“His people elected him to, unfortunately, go after my president,” Boebert said with a laugh. “But we’ve also found ways to work together, like when it comes to unique ZIP Code designations. He showed the utmost support.”

Raskin consoled her following an embarrassing 2023 surveillance video showing her groping her date and being led out of a Denver theater after patrons complained she was causing a disturbance.

“That was a tough time for her,” he said.

‘Be human for a moment’

During the interview, Raskin spoke of his relationship with other Republicans — including former Reps. Lynne Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, who were members of the Jan. 6 committee — but pointedly steered the conversation back to Boebert.

“I don’t want to understate my friendship with Lauren,” he said. She was “very kind” after he was diagnosed with Diffuse Large B Cell Lymphoma in December 2022, Raskin said. He wore a bandana during chemotherapy treatment that was given to him by rock musician Steven Van Zandt, a Raskin favorite who is with Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band and appeared in “The Sopranos” television drama.

Boebert said she is grateful that Raskin was able to “ring the bell,” signaling the end of chemotherapy, in April 2023.

“Then we shared some more tears, very happy tears,” she said. “It was just a really moving moment. You can put our very, very [many] differences aside and be human for a moment.”

Then, in November 2024, Raskin became a grandfather. “Our oldest daughter had a baby the day after the (presidential) election,” he said. “That was some good Democratic counter-programming. So my granddaughter talks to me on FaceTime every day.”

Little has been written about his friendship with Boebert. But Raskin spoke of it to a surprised New York City audience in 2024 while helping Rabbi Shai Held launch a new book. Held is president and dean of the Hadar Institute, a Jewish educational center.

“Take somebody who you might not guess I’d be friends with, Lauren Boebert from Colorado,” Raskin told the crowd.

The audience in the synagogue on Manhattan’s liberal Upper West was stunned, Held recalled in an interview this week with The Sun.

“There was an audible gasp when he said it,” the rabbi said. “People were like, ‘What?’”

Raskin continued: “I was going through chemo and all that, and Lauren was very, very good to me. You never know who’s going to show up when you have cancer. And so we became friends.”

Held, whose book was about love’s place in Judaism, told The Sun: “I thought it was really powerful that Jamie shared that story. The challenge is to sort of see and affirm the humanity of people we disagree with without whitewashing or apologizing for views we find troubling and sometimes even reprehensible. There is a fine line to walk there, but we have no choice to walk it if we’re going to hold together as a society, right?”

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