Here’s Rep. Raskin during a panel discussion in February talking about how Democrats can “protect democracy” by refusing to acknowledge Donald Trump’s victory should he win in November:

“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 is one of the more frightening totalitararians in the Democratic Party’s ranks. He’s smart, he’s ruthless, he lies like he’s rolling out of bed, and he wields “it isn’t what it is” as deftly as a Samurai swings his katana. I could use that speech in a civics or logic class exam: “Explain what’s wrong with this rant?”

Does Raskin really believe that taking steps to block vote harvesting is an attack on the right to vote? Since he is, as I noted, smart (not like, say, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Cori Bush and the 35-50 (maybe more) mouth-breathers among his colleagues on both sides of the aisle), I strongly suspect that he knows that what he is arguing is nonsense, but also that most maleducated Americans aren’t swift enough to realize it.

Does Raskin know that the Founders intended the Supreme Court to exercise a counterbalancing force on Congress and the Executive Branch, which is why it must be by definition conservative in philosophy and temperament lest it start abusing its power by legislating from the bench (like the Warren Court did dangerously often). I’m pretty sure he knows this too. How dis the Warren Court hangover into the early Burger Court that birthed Roe v. Wade qualify as standing up for “freedom” when it invented a justification to bypass state legislatures so women could have their unwanted children killed in the womb without going through the inconvenience of winning elections.

If he thinks the Supreme Court could have done anything to stop slavery without a war or a Constitutional amendment, Raskin’s an idiot, but again, he isn’t. He’s just sowing distrust of our institutions, because that’s what his party has been doing for almost a decade.

Perhaps the stupidest comment in his statement is the contention that SCOTUS doesn’t have much to do. The Justices are always swamped with cases potential, controversial and difficult, and more now than ever. I’m sure Raskin would like them all to be decided by internet polls.

This guy is a Congressional leader, and he makes irresponsible public statements like that one. God Save the United States of America…