Free Republic

Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) has pushed colleagues on the House Select Committee investigating Jan. 6 to support ditching the Electoral College, Axios’ Jonathan Swan and Hans Nichols reported Sunday. According to the report, Raskin has argued in multiple conversations with committee members that the panel should recommend abolishing the Electoral College to “protect future presidential elections against the subversion that [President Donald Trump] and his allies tried to pull off in 2020,” Swan and Nichols write. In January, Raskin stated in an interview on ABC’s This Week that he opposes the Electoral College — personally preferring a national popular vote...

In 2019, the Democrat-controlled Colorado Senate joined a liberal-state pact designed to eliminate our nation’s Electoral College system. Now a Colorado gubernatorial candidate is, far from just mounting a defense against this, taking the offense: He has proposed instituting an electoral college within his state. It’s an idea that not only could help rural Centennial State counties, but also could virtually neutralize vote fraud’s effectiveness. The Washington Examiner reports on the story: One candidate in Colorado’s gubernatorial election has called for eliminating its one-person, one-vote approach in favor of a state-level electoral college…. Greg Lopez, a Republican candidate for Colorado’s...

Trump Wins CPAC 2024 Straw Poll By 49 Points, DeSantis Second At 21%, Mike Pence Gets 0%Mike Pence and Greg Abbott got 0% of the vote.45th President Donald Trump easily won the CPAC straw poll asking attendees who they would prefer to win the 2024 Republican nomination for President with 70% of the vote. The only other potential candidate coming close to being competitive is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, with 21% of the vote. The overwhelming number of potential 2024 opponents received 0% of the vote.Voters were asked “Thinking ahead, if the 2024 Republican Primary for President in your state...

Describing President Trump’s phone call with Georgia’s top election official as “frightening,” an Illinois Republican congressman suggested that he now regrets his vote for the president and might even be open to a third party if his GOP colleagues continue to echo baseless conspiracy claims about a stolen election. In an interview with Yahoo News’ “Skullduggery” podcast, Rep. Adam Kinzinger also said he is worried about the prospects for violence around the Capitol on Wednesday, when tens of thousands of Trump supporters are expected to show up for protests aimed at pressuring lawmakers to block Joe Biden’s election. Those protesters,...

Vice President Pence has spoken out on January 6, 2021. He announced that President Trump said that Pence had the power to overturn the election that day, and that he should have done so… But he didn’t do it. Vice President Pence is winning considerable points with the mass media and the RINOs for saying that President Trump was wrong; Pence, in fact, did not have the power to overturn the election. In truth, this is a typical example of the Left, and of the Left’s enablers, capitalizing on an example when President Trump was correct in fact, but used...

Reflections on the anniversary of the first Electoral College balloting... On February 4, 1789, the Electoral College met and their votes were tallied, and it was unanimous. All 69 electors (representing the ten states that participated in that first presidential election) named George Washington as their first choice. General Washington was therefore first and only President of the United States who could be said to have been elected unanimously. It makes sense. The General had served his home state of Virginia for twenty years as a state legislator, including national service at the end of that period as one of...

Two Democratic senators and a Democrat-aligned colleague are using the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol incursion as a pretext to change the 1887 Electoral Count Act to essentially squelch challenges to election results. This is ironic because many Democrats — including two-time failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters of California — repeatedly challenged the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s presidency throughout his tenure. In fact, Waters and a handful of other Democrats objected to the certification of Trump’s Electoral College win on the floor of Congress in January 2017. Over the past two decades, Democrats objected to the...

Statement by Donald J. Trump, 45th President of the United States of America 02/01/22 So pathetic to watch the Unselect Committee of political hacks, liars, and traitors work so feverishly to alter the Electoral College Act so that a Vice President cannot ensure the honest results of the election, when just one year ago they said that “the Vice President has absolutely no right to ensure the true outcome or results of an election.” In other words, they lied, and the Vice President did have this right or, more pointedly, could have sent the votes back to various legislators for...

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) went OFF on what she derided as an “old boys club” that is the U.S. Senate following Senator Joe Manchin’s (D-WV) revelation that he was a “no” on President Biden’s Build Back Better bill during an appearance on Fox News Sunday.... ...The Congresswoman then explained out the “people’s house” is often the lone true representation of American democracy, correctly pointing out how the U.S. Senate gives more legislative power to constituents in lesser populated states (seeing as every state gets two Senators) and that the Executive branch is often led by a President who wins the...

It should have been obvious during the few moments of lucidity from Joe Biden’s weird ranting lately: the electoral college is in the Democrats’ crosshairs now that the GOP has taken election integrity more seriously and the Dem administration that was supposed to save the country from Trump has turned out to be such a massive failure. Democrat future presidential wins look as likely as Democrat midterms wins.So how can we tell Democrats will again turn to the unpopular tactic of attacking the electoral college out of desperation? Because Biden himself told us recently.“It's about who gets to count the...

(CNN)As former President Donald Trump prepares for a potential comeback bid in 2024, his allies are flocking to election jobs all the way down to the local level in key battleground states, raising new concerns that the election officials who blocked Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election won't be there the next time around. Trump himself has endorsed candidates for secretary of state and attorney general -- statewide races that play a crucial role in administering elections -- who have spread his lies about 2020. But in addition to statewide roles, Trump's acolytes are pursuing local election posts, even...

Wisconsin State Representative Timothy Ramthun (R-Campbellsport) released a statement on Thursday calling for the “decertification” of Wisconsin’s 10 electoral ballots, regarding the 2020 general election. He issued a statement following the October release of the bi-partisan Legislative Audit Bureau report and the press release from the Racine County Sheriff’s Department on Thursday. State Representative Timothy Ramthun released the following statement: I have continued to pursue truth and integrity of our 2020 general election. Recent developments have made it abundantly clear that the legislature should not have certified Wisconsin’s 10 electoral ballots on December 14, 2020. The release of the bi-partisan...

Will the Hispanic Right Turn Last? Noah Rudnick is the director of research at Cygnal, a Republican polling firm, and writes a blog about historical election trends. One of the surprises on Election Night 2020 was how much Donald Trump gained among Latino voters, especially in such regions as Miami-Dade County and the Rio Grande Valley in Texas that had long been Democratic strongholds. Later Pew polling of 2020 voters would show that Hispanic voters nationwide went from voting in 2016 for Hillary Clinton by a margin of 38 percentage points to voting in 2020 for Joe Biden by a...

NEW YORK (AP) — As political muscle goes, bigger doesn’t always mean better. Just ask New York, Los Angeles and Chicago every four years, when those cities become mostly irrelevant blips on the Electoral College map. But as congressional redistricting gets underway, some of the country’s most populous cities are taking prominent roles in reshaping the balance of power in Washington. And that’s good news for Democrats. Robust growth in the liberal strongholds of New York and metropolitan Chicago are poised to give Democrats an edge as their political maps are redrawn to adjust for changes in population over the...

In an article last week, I posited that the silent majority in America is angry and becoming loud. A reader — we'll call him Lloyd — sent me the following: "Trump-supporters are neither silent nor the majority ... and if we had a straight-up popular vote of what the majority of the people want, you'd never win again." I believe that's a challenge to my assumptions. Are conservatives really a majority, or are they just using the Electoral College to occasionally cheat the "will of the people" to win as a minority? The second part of Lloyd's statement implies that...

A campaign to nullify the Electoral College has come to a screeching halt. For more than a decade, the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact (NPVIC) added states until reaching nearly three-quarters of its goal. Yet now it is moving backward, with states that nearly joined in the past rejecting it with large bipartisan majorities. Of 29 NPVIC bills introduced in 16 states, just two received a hearing, and those were voted down with Democrats and Republicans unified in opposition. Rather than a bump in the road, this may be a dead end. The National Popular Vote movement began in 2006,...

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) plans to announce Monday the names of the five Republicans who will sit on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-CA) committee to investigate the riot that occurred January 6 at the U.S. Capitol. McCarthy will appoint Reps. Jim Jordan (R-OH), Jim Banks (R-IN), Troy Nehls (R-TX), Kelly Armstrong (R-ND), and Rodney Davis (R-IL) to sit on the 13-member select committee, according to a senior House GOP aide familiar with the matter. All McCarthy’s appointees voted against impeaching former President Donald Trump in January and all voted against establishing the select committee. Jordan, Banks, and Nehls...

I like to apply free market analysis to American politics. Within established laws, politicians compete for votes and are rewarded for maximizing voters' preferences. As in economics, there are sometimes market failures, but mostly the system seems to be self-regulating. This sounds nice, but it doesn't seem to describe what's been happening over the past five or so years. Both parties seem to be ignoring voters' clear signals. Neither seems to be rationally maximizing its votes and its chances of winning presidential elections or congressional majorities. National Democrats have indeed won the popular vote in six of the last seven...

The District of Columbia and Mayor Muriel Bowser have agreed to pay $220,000 as part of a legal settlement with a local Baptist church that sued the city over in-person worship restrictions during the pandemic. Last September, Capitol Hill Baptist Church sued the district over the government’s ban on outdoor worship services that had more than 100 people in attendance. In a settlement agreement and release approved on Thursday, the city agreed to pay $220,000 to the counsels representing the church, which broke down to $210,000 for the law firm WilmerHale and $10,000 for the national legal nonprofit First Liberty...

As the Arizona audit of 2020 ballots winds down, progressive activists — continuing the tradition they laid out in that extraordinary TIME Magazine article where they admitted all the things they did to ensure a Biden win — are now admitting to traveling from California to Arizona and Georgia to help cure ballots in the days following the election.A California nonprofit called Unite Here is profiled in yet another extraordinary piece in The Atlantic in which they admit they sent activists across state lines to Arizona to help “cure” ballots in the days following the election.The article titled, “How Unite...