Jamie Raskin Claims the Electoral College Would ‘Kill’ Lawmakers
Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin (D) has claimed that the Electoral College would “get lawmakers killed.”
Raskin, who served on the partisan Jan. 6 Committee that investigated former President Donald Trump’s role in the 2021 Capitol protests, recently participated in an interview, where he sounded the alarm against the continued use of the Electoral College to elect presidents.
On Friday, Raskin spoke with The Free Speech project in the nation’s capital.
Throughout the interview, Raskin spoke about Jan. 6 and his efforts to replace the Electoral College with a popular vote system.
Interestingly, the last Republican to win the popular vote was George W. Bush in the 2000 election when he ran against John Kerry.
In the past 24 years, no Republican presidential candidate has won the popular vote.
Nonetheless, during his interview, Raskin pointed out his efforts in replacing the Electoral College.
“We passed the nation’s first National Popular Vote Interstate Compact,” the Maryland Democrat said.
“We initiated that, we’re now more than two thirds of the way there, because it’s 2024,” he added.
“How about it’s time to start electing the president the way we elect mayors and representatives and senators and governors? Whoever gets the most votes, wins,” he continued.
Raskin referred to the Electoral College as an “18th-century ritual” that will lead lawmakers to be “killed,” as reported by Trending Politics News.
“Rather than a convoluted, antique, obsolete system from the 18th century, which these days can get you killed as nearly as it did on January 6, 2021,” Raskin claimed. As Trending Politics News reported, all four victims on Jan. 6 were Trump supporters.
“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,” Raskin pointed out.
“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,” he added.
Raskin argued that presidential candidates who do not win the popular vote should not become president.
“So, look, we’ve had five popular vote losers in American history become president, twice in this century alone, in 2000 and 2016,” Raskin noted.
“And 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,” he went on.
In a video that has gone viral on social media, Raskin suggested that Congress should disqualify Trump from becoming president during the Electoral College certification on Jan. 6, 2025.
“They want to kick it to Congress, so, it’s going to be up to us on January 6, 2025, to tell the rampaging Trump mobs that he’s disqualified and then we need bodyguards,” Raskin said.
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