WATCH: Jamie Raskin Claims Lawmakers Will Be 'Killed' If Electoral College Remains
U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) — one of the most far-left members of Congress and key player in the partisan January 6 Committee that defied more than 100 years of congressional precedent — claimed that the continued usage of the Electoral College system will “get lawmakers killed” during an unhinged interview.
Raskin sat down with The Free Speech project at the Riggs Library in Washington D.C. on Friday. The congressman touched on a number of topics throughout the discussion, including the January 6 Capitol protests, as well as his efforts to replace the Electoral College with a popular vote system.
“We passed the nation’s first National Popular Vote Interstate Compact,” Raskin said. “We initiated that, we’re now more than two thirds of the way there, because it’s 2024. 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.”
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He went on to refer to the Electoral College as an “18th century ritual” that will end up getting people “killed.”
“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. All four of the deceased victims on January 6 were Trump supporters, including Ashli Babbitt, who was shot and killed while surrounded by riot police by a Capitol Police officer who failed to issue a verbal warning.
“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 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.”
He went on to argue that candidates who lose the popular vote should not be allowed to win the presidency.
“So, look, we’ve had five popular vote losers in American history become president, twice in this century alone, in 2000 and 2016,” he said. “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.”
Raskin recently suggested that he and a handful of his Democratic Party colleagues will be leading an effort to refuse to certify former President Trump’s victory if he wins in November. The far-left congressman — who was referred to January 6 trespassers as “violent insurrectionists” for a number of years — suggested that lawmakers will be looking to “disqualify” Trump under a Civil War-era statute.
Raskin specifically referenced Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, expressing a chilling determination to use Congress as a barrier against Trump’s re-election. “What can be put into the Constitution can slip away from you very quickly. And the greatest example going on right now before our very eyes is Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, which they’re just disappearing with a magic wand, as if it doesn’t exist, even though it could not be clearer what it’s stating,” he said.
“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.”