U.S. Rep. Jaime Raskin (D-MD) is trying to convince the American public that former President Donald Trump disqualified himself from running for the presidency in 2024.
Raskin attempted to do so on Sunday, during an appearance on CNN's State of the Union.
This comes after Trump, now, has been disqualified from 2024 ballots in two states: Colorado and Maine.
Both states claim that Trump is disqualified by Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment, which essentially disqualifies those individuals who took certain government oaths and who "engaged in insurrection" from holding public office.
The claim is that Trump took such an oath when he became president and that he "engaged in insurrection" on Jan. 6, 2021.
Legal experts, however, insist that this amendment was never meant to be applied the way anti-Trump groups are attempting to apply it to Trump.
Raskin, during his CNN appearance, essentially tried to claim that using the Fourteenth Amendment to disqualify Trump is reasonable and justified.
During the interview, he whether the U.S. Supreme Court is expected to weigh in on the matter. After answering "yes," Raskin went on a tangent.
"I mean, under constitutional federalism, every state is ultimately going to control its own ballot access and access to candidates for the ballot. And that is obviously difficult when we're talking about electing the president, who is the one official we have got in America who is supposed to represent the entire country, represent everybody. And so I think that the urgency is for the Supreme Court to act," Raskin said.
He continued, " But I think it's going to be tough for some of them, if they want to keep Trump on the ballot, if they're falling for the argument that this is undemocratic. I mean, is it undemocratic that Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jennifer Granholm can't run for president because they weren't born in the country? If you think about it, of all the forms of disqualification we have, the one that disqualifies people for engaging in insurrection is the most democratic, because it's the one where people choose themselves to be disqualified."
Raskin concluded, "In terms of your age or where you were born, that's not up to you. But Donald Trump is in that tiny, tiny number of people who've essentially disqualified themselves."
When Raskin says "the argument that this is undemocratic," what he is referring to is those individuals who have argued that it is undemocratic to use the Fourteenth Amendment to disqualify Trump because it takes away the voting rights of those who would vote for or against Trump.
This is usually a supplementary argument that is raised after the argument that Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment does not apply to Trump.
We'll leave it to you, the reader, to decide what is more Democratic. But, even some Democrats would have to admit that Raskin's arguments - that Trump disqualified himself and that the disqualification is "more democratic" - are a bit of a stretch, to say the least.
