Calling it ‘one on a huge list of priorities,’ Rep. Jamie Raskin, D., Md., announced that he will be reintroducing a prior bill with Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., and Eric Swalwell, D-Calif., to disqualify not just former President Donald Trump but a large number of Republicans from taking office.
The alternative, it appears, is unthinkable: allowing the public to choose their next president and representatives in Congress. It appears that the last thing Democrats want is for the unanimous decision to actually lead to an outbreak of democracy. Where the Court expressly warned of ‘chaos’ in elections, Raskin and others appear eager to be agents of chaos in Congress.
Soon after the decision, Raskin went on CNN to assure people that he and his colleagues would not stand by and allow the right to vote to be restored to citizens in the upcoming election. He pledged to reintroduce a prior bill that would declare Jan. 6 an ‘insurrection’ and that those involved ‘engaged in insurrection.’
I previously wrote about these ‘ballot cleansing’ efforts because it would not just disqualify Trump but potentially dozens of sitting Republican members of Congress. Rep. Bill Pascrell, D-N.J., sought to bar 126 members of Congress under the same theory. Similar legislation offered by Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., to disqualify members got 63 co-sponsors, all Democrats.
Raskin’s participation in this effort is crushingly ironic. In 2016, he sought to block certification of the 2016 election under the very same law as violent protests were occurring before the inauguration.
The prior bills were sweeping and included members who did not engage in any violent acts (no member has been charged with such violence or even incitement) but merely opposed certification).
Raskin recently offered a particularly Orwellian argument for the disqualification of Trump and his colleagues in Congress: ‘If you think about it, of all of the forms of disqualification that we have, the one that disqualifies people for engaging in insurrection is the most democratic because it’s the one where people choose themselves to be disqualified.’
In other words, preventing voters from voting is ‘the most democratic’ because these people choose to oppose certification… as he did in 2016.
After the ruling, Raskin added the curious claim that the justices ‘didn’t exactly disagree with [the disqualification theory]. They just said that they’re not the ones to figure it out. It’s not going to be a matter for judicial resolution under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment, but it’s up to Congress to enforce it.’
That was sharply different from the pre-decision Raskin who insisted that there was no real question legally and that the case before the justices was ‘their opportunity to behave like real Supreme Court justices.’
Well, they did act as ‘real Supreme Court justices’ by unanimously opposing what the court described as the ‘chaos’ that would unfold with such state disqualification efforts. Raskin, however, is seeking a new avenue for chaos through Congress.
Raskin’s statement is also bizarre in claiming that somehow the justices agreed with him and the others pushing disqualification. No one, not even the Trump team, questioned that Congress could act to bar people from office. It is expressly stated in the Constitution. It is not an ‘argument’ but a fact.
Of course, the Democrats would need to craft the legislation correctly to satisfy the standard and secure the support of both houses. Neither appears likely at this point.
However, Raskin is succeeding in one respect. He and his colleagues have bulldozed any moral high ground after Jan. 6. Most of us condemned the riot on that day as a desecration of our constitutional process. Yet, the Democrats have responded with the most anti-democratic efforts to prevent voters from exercising their rights in the upcoming election.
For these members, citizens cannot be trusted with this power as Trump tops national polls as the leading choice for the presidency. It is the constitutional version of the Big Gulp law, voters, like consumers, have to be protected against their own unhealthy choices.
Raskin has continued to accuse the nine justices of being cowards in not supporting ballot cleansing. He told CNN that the court ‘doesn’t like the ultimate and inescapable implications of just enforcing the Constitution, as written.’ In other words, all nine justices, including the three liberals justices, are disregarding clear constitutional mandates to protect Trump.
It is the same delusional view echoed by other liberals who were enraged by the decision. Former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann declared that ‘the Supreme Court has betrayed democracy. Its members including Jackson, Kagan and Sotomayor have proved themselves inept at reading comprehension. And collectively the ‘court’ has shown itself to be corrupt and illegitimate. It must be dissolved.’
After all, nothing says democracy like ballot cleansing and dissolving courts before a national election.
With the resumption of efforts to disqualify Republicans from running on ballots, Raskin and his colleagues seem to be channeling the spirit of former Mayor Richard Daley in the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago.
With allegations of abuse by the police in cracking down on protests, Daley declared ‘the policeman isn’t there to create disorder; the policeman is there to preserve disorder.’ With Democrats preparing to return to Chicago for their convention this year, Raskin and others appear to be responding to the court that ‘the party isn’t there to create chaos, the party is there to preserve chaos.’
This column was first published on the author’s blog, Res ipsa loquitur – The thing itself speaks