Jamie Raskin Says Electoral College an ‘Accident Waiting to Happen’ That Must Be Dealt With NOW to Stop Another Trump ‘Seizing’ Presidency

In one of the 41 mentions of ex-president Donald Trump across more than half of his show on Friday, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes prompted Maryland Democrat Rep. Jamie Raskin on the different aspects of investigations such as that which prompted the Mar-a-Lago raid.

Raskin’s answer was that in addition to changing the criminal code to prevent someone from “seizing” the presidency, but that it’s time to alter the very structure of American elections, post-Trump.

“You were a constitutional law professor before you were a United States congressman. I would like to hear you talk about these different aspects of an inquiry or making the case here,” said Hayes toward the end of the interview. “There’s a difference between what I would call the great crime of Donald Trump, which was a frontal assault on the core of American democracy, and whatever statutory violation of the U.S. Code he may have committed. And sometimes, it can feel a little bit like a mismatch there, and I wonder how you think about those, sort of, two lanes.”

“Well, obviously, we’re gonna need some legislative changes to the criminal code, to account for now the possibility of presidents taking a headlong rush at seizing the presidency,” said Raskin. “But there are federal statutes out there that will do the job.”

“We have course have seditious conspiracy. We have conspiracy to interfere with the federal proceeding, which I think everybody can agree took place here,” Raskin continued, describing the events of January 6 and saying they were not “spontaneous” but rather planned in advance.

“So, yeah, I think that we will have to look at some new federal statutory changes,” he said.

Raskin expanded from new laws and statutes to the broad process of elections altogether, hyping a refrain now common on his side of the aisle about the electoral college.

“We have to look at the way that the electoral system itself is vulnerable to strategic bad faith actors like Donald Trump,” he said as Hayes nodded sagely. “The Electoral College is an accident waiting to happen and we have to deal with that at some point in American history.”

“Why not now?” Raskin concluded.

Watch the clip above, via MSNBC.