This week, a video of a panel talk in February 2024 came to light in which Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said he thought Congress would have to throw out an election win by former President Donald Trump, even if it meant starting a “civil war.”
It’s not clear if Raskin was actually outlining a plan or just making an argument that the U.S. Supreme Court was making it too difficult for Congress to keep Trump out of office by using a hypothetical case.
Raskin was in charge of the House impeachment managers during Trump’s second trial. They said he was trying to change the results of the 2020 election. He was also on the January 6 Committee, but he didn’t agree with the findings of the 2017 election.
On February 17, 2024, Raskin made a video at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C. He said that the Supreme Court would say that Congress was in charge of removing Trump from the ballot in several states, even though Democrats were trying to do so using Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment.
After the Civil War, Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment prohibited former Confederates from holding government office. Left and right-wing critics of Trump claimed he committed “insurrection” and couldn’t run for president again.
Several Democratic states didn’t let Trump run for office in their primary elections until March, when the Supreme Court decided unanimously against them, saying that Congress, not the states, is in charge of upholding Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment.
Raskin went on to say that because of how the Supreme Court is likely to rule, Congress might have to step in if Trump wins the election, which would lead to “civil war conditions.”
Raskin was wrong when he said that “not all” of the nine judges would stop Democrats from trying to keep Trump off the ticket. Strangely, he talked about “great protection” even though Justice Brett Kavanaugh was the target of an assassination attempt in June 2022, and the Department of Justice still wouldn’t get rid of the protesters in front of his house, even though it is against federal law for people to hold protests outside of the justices’ private homes.
Breitbart News has asked Rep. Raskin’s office for more information or to clarify what he said.
Author: Steven Sinclaire
