January 6 Committee, on Eve of Television Debut, Mulls Abolishing Electoral College

The House Select Committee established to review the events of January 6, 2021, could veer from its assignment and recommend abolishing the Electoral College that handed up Donald Trump as president. That report, from Axios, suggests that the committee endorses what has long been a goal of the left-most faction among Democrats.The beat by Axios comes as the committee is set to commence on Thursday public hearings designed to publicize its findings to the nation, after deliberations that have been riven by debate over how far to go in its prescriptions for American democracy. Altering or ending the Electoral College would require amending the Constitution.The two sides in those disputes have found their champions in Representatives Jamie Raskin, who supports nixing the Electoral College, and Elizabeth Cheney, who, with Congressman Adam Kinzinger, is one of only two Republicans on the committee and who supports retaining the Electoral College. Mr. Raskin was the manager for the House who, in the second impeachment of President Trump, failed to win a conviction of Mr. Trump, who was cleared — pronounced “not guilty” — by the Senate of insurrection on January 6. The prosecution led by Mr. Raskin fell far short of the votes needed for conviction. On Monday, he previewed the televised hearings, claiming to the Washington Post that the select committee “has found evidence about a lot more than incitement here.”In April, Mr. Raskin promised that the hearings would “tell a story that will really blow the roof off the House” as the committee unfurls “a story of the most heinous and dastardly political offense ever organized by a president and his followers and his entourage in the history of the United States.”Mr. Raskin’s ambitions go beyond recapitulating Mr. Trump’s role on that day in January 2021. Reports suggest that he supports a move to a purely popular vote to elect the president. That would make him a subscriber to the historian Joseph Ellis’s view that the Electoral College is “the sour note within the otherwise artful song called the Constitution.” In 2016, Mr. Trump captured the White House by virtue of his 306 vortex in the Electoral College, despite losing the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes to Secretary of State Clinton. The popular vote in and of itself, though, was never intended by the Founders to be the instrument to decide the presidency. Mrs. Cheney, vilified by those who support Mr. Trump and censured by the Republican National Committee, has expressed allegiance to the current method, whereby each state entrusts electors apportioned on the basis of population. The status quo is thought to help smaller states, like her own Wyoming.A less divisive, but by no means universally acclaimed proposal, is altering the Electoral Count Act, which is thought to be championed by Representative Adam Schiff, who led the first impeachment push against Mr. Trump.The ECA was passed in 1887, a decade after the notoriously disputed election of 1876, where a host of machinations after Election Day delivered the presidency to Rutherford B. Hayes, a war hero praised by General Grant for “conspicuous gallantry.”The ECA allows one congressman paired with one senator to object to the results submitted by each state, a clause both parties have exploited in the past, and relied on heavily by Mr. Trump in 2020.Senator McConnell, the minority leader, and — with particular clarity — the Wall Street Journal have supported efforts to amend the ECA. Mr. McConnell told ABC News: “I think it needs fixing, and I wish them well, and I’d be happy to take a look at whatever they can come up with.”Senator Schumer, the majority leader, has scoffed at the reforms, which would include judicial review of state results and procedure to make it more difficult for Congress to toss out results deemed legitimate. He labeled the push, which is being led by Senator Collins, “unacceptably insufficient and even offensive.”The events of January 6 will soon be recapitulated not only in Congress, but in court. On Monday, the Department of Justice charged five members of the Proud Boys — who describe themselves as “Western chauvinists” — with seditious conspiracy. The same charge has already been brought against the head of the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes. Two days before the “Stop the Steal” rally on January 6, Mr. Rhodes — a graduate of Yale Law School — posted on the group’s website urging members of the organization to “stand tall in support of President Trump’s fight to defeat the enemies foreign and domestic who are attempting a coup.”According to Axios and the New York Post, among others, the January 6 committee has retained a former president of ABC News, James Goldston, to, as the Post put it, “help convert a cache of documents, depositions, recorded footage and other materials related to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot into compelling television for those who have not closely followed the proceedings.”

January 6 Committee, on Eve of Television Debut, Mulls Abolishing Electoral College

January 6 Committee, on Eve of Television Debut, Mulls Abolishing Electoral College

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