A video emerged on Monday featuring a panel discussion from February 2024, in which Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD) suggested that Congress might need to annul an election victory by former President Donald Trump, warning of the potential for “civil war.” It remains uncertain whether Raskin was proposing a concrete course of action or merely using a hypothetical scenario to illustrate his belief that the U.S. Supreme Court was imposing an excessive burden on Congress to prevent Trump from assuming office.

Raskin previously led the House impeachment managers during Trump’s second trial, accusing him of attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election. He was also a member of the January 6 Committee, despite having objected to the election results in 2017. The video, recorded at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C. on February 17, 2024, featured Raskin predicting that the Supreme Court would obstruct Democratic attempts to remove Trump from the ballot in various states based on Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, asserting that it was Congress’s responsibility to address this issue.

Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment was enacted following the Civil War to prevent former Confederates from holding federal office. Critics of Trump from both the left and the right have attempted to argue that he engaged in “insurrection” as defined by that section, thereby disqualifying him from running for president again.

Several Democratic-led states attempted to exclude Trump from primary election ballots until the Supreme Court unanimously ruled against these actions in March, affirming that the enforcement of Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment falls under Congress’s jurisdiction, not the states’. Raskin further stated that, in light of the anticipated Supreme Court decision, Congress would hypothetically need to intervene if Trump were to win the election, potentially leading to “civil war conditions.”

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