Video surfaced Monday of a panel discussion in February 2024 in which Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) speculated that Congress would have to invalidate an election victory by former President Donald Trump — at the risk of “civil war.”
It is not clear whether Raskin was actually outlining a plan of action, or rather using a hypothetical to argue that the U.S. Supreme Court was placing what he considered an undue burden on Congress to keep Trump out of office.
Raskin led the House impeachment managers in Trump’s second trial, accusing him of trying to overturn the 2020 election. He also served on the January 6 Committee, though he himself objected to the election results in 2017.
In the video, which was filmed at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C. on February 17, 2024, Raskin predicted that the Supreme Court would block Democrats’ efforts to exclude Trump from the ballot in several states on the basis of Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, and would instead say that Congress had that responsibility.
Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted after the Civil War to bar former Confederates from holding federal office. Trump-haters on both the left and the right tried to argue that Trump had committed “insurrection” under the language of that section, and therefore was barred from running for president again.
Several Democratic states excluded Trump from primary election ballots until the Supreme Court — unanimously — ruled against them in March, holding that Congress is responsible for enforcing Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, and not the states.
Raskin went on to say that given the likely Supreme Court ruling, Congress would hypothetically have to take matters into its own hands, in the event that Trump won the election, triggering “civil war conditions” (emphasis added — see 58:39 in the video below):
What I would say is, you know, we’ve got to play defense and offense in 2024. The right to vote is under attack in very specific ways in lots of states, especially in some of the Deep South states, especially in Florida, which I just returned from. There’s just unbelievable stuff going on there — like, if you have to send a mail-in ballot or absentee ballot, you have to have a — you can only have it taken to the mailbox or the polls by a member of your nuclear family who lives with you. OK? So there’s just a million traps for the unwary that are being set across the country. But at the same time, we do have to get on offense for the articulation of a constitutional right to vote that’s meaningful for everybody in the country. The million of people who are left out, and disenfranchised, and for everybody whose right to vote is rendered vulnerable by this Supreme Court. And you know, I like very much the point that both Sherlyn [Ifill] and Rick have been making about the Supreme Court. I mean, we’ve got to remember that for the vast majority of American history, the Supreme Court has not been a friend to the people. It has been overwhelmingly in a reactionary or conservative mode, I mean, all the way up until the Civil War. What did the Supreme Court ever do for enslaved people in our country? Absolutely nothing, other than cement their status in the Dred Scott decision, saying that African-Americans had no rights that the white man was bound to respect. And then even after the Civil War, even after the Reconstruction amendments, in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson, constitutionalizing Jim Crow. And then it’s not until the Warren Court for a couple of decades, with the white primary cases, and Brown v. Board, where you get a different kind of Supreme Court on the side of the freedoms and equality of the American people. But the court is not going to save us. And so that means the only thing that really works is people in motion amending the Constitution — but again, it’s necessary, but it’s not sufficient, because what can be put in 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 Fourteenth 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. And so 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 for everybody, and civil war conditions, all because the nine justices — not all of them, but these justices who have not many cases to look at every year, not that much work to do, a huge staff, great protection — simply do not want to do their job and interpret what the great Fourteenth Amendment means.
Raskin was incorrect, in that he claimed that “not all” of the nine justices would block Democrats’ attempt to exclude Trump from the ballot. His reference to “great protection” is also strange, since Justice Brett Kavanaugh was targeted by an assassination attempt in June 2022 — and the Department of Justice still refused to remove protesters from in front of his house, deliberately ignoring federal law that prohibits protests outside of the justices’ private residences.
Breitbart News has reached out to Rep. Raskin’s office for further comment or clarification about his remarks.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of “”The Agenda: What Trump Should Do in His First 100 Days,” available for pre-order on Amazon. He is also the author of “The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency,” now available on Audible. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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