#Senator raskin full

“If Mike Pence had gone along with it, it certainly would have happened.” ‘A religious and political cult’ “We were very close to all of that happening,” Raskin said. Would he simply pass along the results of the Electoral College, as his predecessors had all done? Or would he toss out the electoral votes of a few battleground states Trump had lost, throwing the election to the House? 6, the fate of American democracy hinged on how Vice President Mike Pence understood his constitutional role.

Now, if Raskin’s worst fears were realized and Trump engineered a contingent election in the House, President-elect Joe Biden would lose. Another of Raskin’s Iowa candidates, Rita Hart, lost by just six votes. now had a 27-22 majority of state delegations even though Democrats still controlled the House as a whole. They flipped the Iowa delegation after unseating Representative Abby Finkenauer, meaning the G.O.P. 3, 2020, Republicans knocked off nearly a dozen House Democrats. “I had to engage in a mini-constitutional seminar with everybody we were asking for money,” Raskin said. Then, he steered money toward them through a group he named “Twelfth Amendment Defenders Fund.”īack then, educating donors about such a hypothetical scenario proved to be quite an endeavor. First, he identified nearly two dozen Democratic candidates who would be crucial to either defending or flipping House delegations. So Raskin sought to change the balance of power via the upcoming election. But if Democrats could flip at least one Republican-held delegation, they would deny the G.O.P. That put Democrats at a disadvantage, because before the 2020 election, Republicans controlled 26 states to Democrats’ 22 (two others were tied). All the representatives from each state vote on that state’s choice for president, and then each state casts one vote. Instead of a simple majority of House lawmakers, a majority of House delegations picks the winner. Under the 12th Amendment, if no candidate musters a majority of the Electoral College to Congress on the appointed day, the House must immediately vote to choose the new president. Some colleagues, Raskin said, suggested he was overthinking the prospect for Republican misdeeds, saying, “There’s the constitutional law professor again, you know, lost in the nooks and crannies of the Constitution.” 12th Amendment arcanaĪs Raskin delved deeper, he realized that Democrats were vulnerable to one potential Trump move in particular: the triggering of a “contingent election” in the House of Representatives. 6 gambit, Raskin found it eerily similar to his own thinking. When investigators later unearthed a proposed six-step plan by John Eastman, a fringe conservative scholar who advised Trump on his Jan. “I fault myself for not having taken seriously the possibility of the outdoors violence entering into the chamber.” “Everything he ended up doing we essentially predicted, other than unleashing the violent insurrection against us,” Raskin said. Raskin summed up his findings a few months later in a memo to Pelosi’s leadership team. “I just figured out what they would do if they wanted to win.” “We all had become great students of Donald Trump and his psyche,” Raskin recalled. Over the next few months, he tried to piece together the Trump team’s likely strategy. So when Pelosi asked him to game out what Trump might do in November, Raskin undertook the task with characteristic vigor.

#Senator raskin full

She confided in Raskin, who had long been obsessed with the Electoral College system, which he thought was full of “booby traps” that someone like Trump could exploit.