If you listen to U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., the real insurrection will be led by Democrats and it will begin on Jan. 6, 2025 — should the American people dare to elect former President Donald Trump president again.
In a video clip making the rounds Monday on social media, the far left firebrand laments what he characterizes as a lazy U.S. Supreme Court interfering with the Democratic Party’s plan to interfere with the 2024 election.
“And so [the court] want to kick it to Congress, so it’s going to be up to us on Jan. 6, 2025 to tell the rampaging Trump mobs that he’s disqualified,” Raskin said in a panel discussion on Feb. 17, as the Supreme Court was mulling the constitutionality of the leftist Colorado secretary of state’s use of Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to remove Trump from the state’s presidential primary ballot.
“And then we need bodyguards for everybody and civil war conditions all because nine justices — not all of them, but these justices who have not many cases to look at every year, not much work to do, have a huge staff, great protection — simply do not want to do their job and interpret what the great 14th Amendment means,” Raskin declared at a Washington, D.C. bookstore gathering of self-important leftists.
Raskin’s rant may rank among the more incendiary comments about the court since U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., unleashed his “release the whirlwind” diatribe at a pro-abortion rally on the steps of the high court in 2020. The congressman’s vitriol simply cements the fact that the same people calling Trump a threat to democracy would assault the will of the people to keep the Republican from governing.
“Congressman Raskin continues to stoke the flames of division in this country through his use of incendiary language aimed at his political opponents, and once again proves the hypocrisy of leftists like him who slander conservatives in an attempt to mask progressives’ proclivity towards violence which has been on full display in cities and college campuses across America in recent times,” U.S. Rep. Anthony D’Esposito, R-N.Y., told The Federalist Monday evening.
Raskin’s office did not respond to a request for comment. His bellicose statements will mean nothing if Republicans take back the Senate and hold the House, but they are a look into the Trump-hating radical mindset of Democrats that will stop at nothing to maintain power. In a tinder box election year seared by an assassination attempt against the GOP’s presidential candidate, Raskin’s threatening rhetoric now seems more like the release of the whirlwind than ever.
‘This year is critical’
The congressman, known for his overheated rhetoric, made his fiery statements alongside Sherrilyn Ifill, leftist law professor and former president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. She also served on the boards of the George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, according to InfluenceWatch. Raskin and Ifill were discussing the latest book by Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at the UCLA School of law and vehement critic of basic voter integrity tools such as voter ID. Hasen’s book, A Real Right to Vote: How a Constitutional Amendment Can Safeguard American Democracy, as the title implies, calls for a constitutional amendment to “enshrine the right to vote.” He and his fellow leftists assert the Supreme Court historically, and particularly today’s conservative-led court, has been “no friend of the people.”
Acknowledging that “the path to a constitutional amendment is undoubtedly hard,” Hasen insists that changing the constitution by outlawing fundamental state election integrity laws is the way to save democracy. In the meantime, militant-sounding Democrats believe they’re on a righteous mission to save democracy — even if it means destroying it. Their dire warnings bounded into the absurd.
“I absolutely believe that this year is critical to whether or not we are a democracy this time next year having a conversation in this room, having this conversation, which will be allowed in this place but there will be many places in this country where it’s not allowed,” Ifill dourly predicted. “Should we get past next year as a democracy this is the work we should be doing.”
Remember that all of this theatrical melancholy came days before the U.S. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that kicking a political party’s leading political candidate off the primary ballot under the auspices of an amendment that enshrines the principle of due process doesn’t comport with the Constitution. It doesn’t look real good for democracy, either.
Colorado’s far left secretary of state agreed with leftist lawfare groups that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment barred Trump from running because he, without being convicted of the crime, in their eyes engaged in an insurrection. The Constitution, contrary to the Democrats’ twisted reading, gives Congress, not the states, enforcement authority over the post-Civil War amendment.
“Because the Constitution makes Congress, rather than the States, responsible for enforcing Section 3 against federal officeholders and candidates, we reverse,” the Supreme Court ruling, released in March, states.
Constitutional law expert Hans von Spakovsky said the Article 3 argument was legally flawed from the beginning.
“I don’t believe the provision is still effect because of the Amnesty Acts passed by Congress,” said von Spakovsky, manager of the Heritage Foundation’s Election Law Reform Initiative, “In any event, this is an anachronistic provision that was driven by the passions inflamed by a civil war that killed and wounded more Americans than in any other war we have ever fought. It is an insult to those who fought in that conflagration for this congressman to try to use it to go after his political opponents, because that is what it amounts to.”
‘Something Akin to a Civil War’
As the decision loomed, Raskin expressed foreboding that the court would not uphold Colorado’s decision to disenfranchise the 555,000 voters who cast ballots for Trump in the Centennial State’s March primary — and many millions more to follow in other blue states.
“Last night I was most worried about the Supreme Court’s prospective, imminent abdication of its very clear duty to disqualify Donald Trump form the ballot … and what that might mean if their decision says it’s really up to Congress on Jan. 6, 2025 to disqualify him at the counting of electoral college votes, which really could lead to something akin to a civil war,” Raskin told his fellow D.C. leftists.
Keeping with his party’s projection campaign talking points, Raskin insisted that “the right to vote is under attack in very specific ways in lots of states.” He is, of course, correct. Just not in the way the liberal elitist thinks he is. Democracy is under attack, and Democrats hold the cudgel.
