Jan 6 hearing: GOP senator says Raskin has side-motive to 'abolish' electoral college
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah., joins 'Hannity' Thursday to respond to the Maryland Democratic congressman's desire to remove 'fundamental' piece of American democracy.
The New York Times published a column that calls to "end the Electoral College in its current form" by using the threat of a coup to justify the longtime left-wing goal of abolishing the system used to determine the president.
Times opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie penned, "There’s a Reason Trump Could Try to Overturn the Results of the 2020 Election," which begins by declaring the Senate "isn’t entirely useless" because of a bipartisan effort to make it harder to overturn the results of future presidential election.
"A direct response to Donald Trump’s multipronged attempt to stay in power, the bill is meant to keep a future candidate for president, including a losing incumbent, from following the same playbook," Bouie wrote.
"At its heart, the bill is a major revision of the 1887 Electoral Count Act, which Trump and his legal team tried to exploit to create confusion over the certification of electors and the counting of electoral votes. Specifically, Trump pressured Republican state legislators in key swing states he lost to throw out votes and send false slates of electors in place of those won by Joe Biden. He then coordinated with allies in Congress to object to the counting of Biden’s electors and pushed former Vice President Mike Pence to toss out those electors and, if needed, move the election to the House of Representatives, where Republicans controlled enough state delegations to keep him in office," Bouie continued. "The bill would address each part of the scheme. It would require states to choose electors according to the laws that existed before Election Day and prevent state legislatures from overriding the popular vote by declaring a ‘failed election.’"
The New York Times published a column that calls to "end the Electoral College in its current form." (DON EMMERT/AFP via Getty Images)
The Times columnist further explained what he considers a "good bill," but indicated he’s unsure if it can actually pass the Senate.
"It blocks many of the most immediate threats to presidential elections and closes most avenues for postelection subversion under the current system. At the same time, it should be said that the reason that any of this is possible — the reason Trump had a path to overturning the results of the election in the first place — is the antidemocratic aspect of the current system," Bouie wrote. "Even with the provisions of this bill in place, the Electoral College provides any number of opportunities for mischief."
The columnist believes the Electoral College offers an incentive to "meddle" with the process.
"The fact that the loser of the national popular vote can become the winner of a national election is an additional incentive to subvert the voting process and impede access to the ballot box. And the fact that a legislature could, before the election itself, simply allocate electors to the candidate of its choice without any input from the public is an ongoing and ever-present threat to electoral democracy," he wrote.
Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers, a member of Wisconsin's Electoral College, cast his vote at the state Capitol in Madison, Wis., Monday, Dec. 14, 2020. (AP Photo/Morry Gash, Pool) ((AP Photo/Morry Gash, Pool via Getty))
Bouie believes many Americans feel "every Californian is a San Francisco liberal and every Texan is a right-wing Dallas suburbanite," but the Times columnist disagrees with that notion.
"The Electoral College makes it difficult to see that each state contains a multitude of political perspectives, and that our democracy might be a little healthier if the vote of a Seattle Republican mattered as much for the outcome of a presidential election as that of a Green Bay Democrat," he wrote. "The single most important reform we could make for our presidential elections is to end the Electoral College in its current form, whether that means a national popular vote or the proportional allocation of electors (which already exists in both Maine and Nebraska) or some hybrid of the two."
Bouie concluded the piece by noting that Americans should "scrap the rules that make subversion a tempting option to begin with" instead of simply patching holes in the current process.
Former President Donald Trump. (Getty Images)
"With that said, the most important safeguard for our electoral system isn’t a particular set of rules and arrangements, but political actors who accept defeat, honor the results of an election and allow the winner to take and exercise the power to which they’re entitled. And it is a serious, possibly existential problem for American democracy that a large part of one of our two major parties just doesn’t want to play ball," he wrote.
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