The Democrats are always prattling on about the supposed “threat to democracy” that Donald Trump and the GOP pose, yet time after time, it’s they themselves who are constantly undermining the Constitution with their attacks on the Supreme Court and their attempts to “reform it,” their endless assaults on free speech, and, of course, their stated goal to nuke the electoral college.
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Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), who disgraced himself by spitting on the Constitution by serving as the lead House manager in Trump’s second silly impeachment trial, is the latest Dem to deliver unhinged remarks on this topic as he spoke Friday with The Free Speech project at the Riggs Library in Washington D.C.
About the Electoral College, he said, “These days [it] can get you killed.”
Wow. I knew it was important, but I confess to being unaware that it might kill you. The process caused January 6, he claimed:
“Rather than a convoluted, antique, obsolete system from the 18th century, which these days can get you killed as nearly it did on January 6, 2021,” he claimed.
“I mean, we were meeting [at the Capitol] just because of the formalities of the 12th Amendment which say that you’ve got to have a joint session to count the Electoral College votes sent in by the governors under the certificates of ascertainment,” he said. “But we knew who had won the election. Everybody knew who had won the election, but we’re still going through these 18th century rituals and that’s what gave Donald Trump the opportunity to invoke the mob- ‘come here, we’ll be wild’ and then tell them to go and ‘fight and fight like hell’ or they wouldn’t have a country anymore.”
Watch:
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The left would love to shred the Constitution if they could:
Kamala Harris Supports Constitution-Defying Limits on Supreme Court Justices
Joe Rogan Goes Nuclear on NY Times for Calling the Constitution ‘Dangerous’
He also claimed that a majority of Americans want the Electoral College abolished:
We’ve had five popular vote losers in American history become president, twice in this century alone, in 2000 and 2016
I think the vast majority of American people think we should be electing the president just by having an election in seeing who gets the most votes, rather than this convoluted, rickety system where it all comes down to a handful of states, six or seven states instead of everybody’s vote counting equally everywhere in the country.
The problem with that is constitutional provisions are not changed or abandoned based on polls—you need a constitutional amendment, which would require approval from two-thirds of Congress and three-quarters of the states. Good luck with that, Jamie.
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In addition, the Electoral College was not just provided for on a whim; the framers spent many hours and days debating the way we should elect our president. Among other goals, they were trying to balance out the popular vote in order to make sure that the most populous regions didn’t simply overpower the rest of the country:
The Founding Fathers established the Electoral College in the Constitution, in part, as a compromise between the election of the President by a vote in Congress and election of the President by a popular vote of qualified citizens. However, the term “electoral college” does not appear in the Constitution. Article II of the Constitution and the 12th Amendment refer to “electors,” but not to the “electoral college.”
Since the Electoral College process is part of the original design of the U.S. Constitution it would be necessary to pass a Constitutional amendment to change this system.
There are many reasons why simply abolishing the College might sound good but actually have unintended consequences. Here are some common arguments for keeping it as it was intended:
The Electoral College ensures that all parts of the country are involved in selecting the President of the United States…
The Electoral College was created to protect the voices of the minority from being overwhelmed by the will of the majority…
The Electoral College can preclude calls for recounts or demands for run-off elections, giving certainty to presidential elections…
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Raskin and the Democrats hate the Electoral College because it tries to give a regional balance to our presidential elections and helps smaller states have a say, not just blue behemoths like California and New York.