Ralph talks to Democratic Congressman, Jamie Raskin, about what issues the Dems have to run on to take over the House. And editor of Ballot Access News, Richard Winger, explains how the two major parties conspire to keep third parties off the ballot. Plus, listener questions!
Jamie Raskin represents Maryland’s 8th Congressional District in the House of Representatives. He is the Vice-Ranking Member of the House Judiciary Committee, and serves on two Judiciary subcommittees: the Subcommittee on the Constitution and Civil Justice; and the Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, Homeland Security, and Investigation. For more than twenty-five years, Congressman Raskin has been a professor of constitutional law at American University’s Washington College of Law. He authored several books, including the Washington Post bestseller “Overruling Democracy: The Supreme Court versus the American People” and the highly-acclaimed “We the Students: Supreme Court Cases For and About America’s Students.”
“What we (the Democrats) need to do is to put our agenda forward in terms of defending Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid against their clear effort to pay for their (the Republicans) atrocious tax legislation – which was a trillion and a half dollar giveaway to special interests – by cutting people’s benefits… We’ve got to advance the minimum wage and fight for that in order to give America a raise. And we’ve got to remind everybody that they are not anti-regulation. They would love to regulate the poor in a way that would give them no access to their nutritional benefits. They would love to regulate women’s healthcare, so women and their families would not have access to Planned Parenthood.”
Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin
Richard Winger is an advocate for more equitable laws allowing access to the ballot for minor parties. Winger has testified on behalf of these issues in court cases across the country and has been published in journals ranging from the Journal of Election Law to the Fordham Urban Law Review. In 1985 he began publishing Ballot Access News, the national monthly newsletter covering developments in ballot access law and third parties in general.
“Poor Gore. He didn’t know. None of us knew there were seven thousand Florida voters who both exed the box next to Gore’s name and wrote him in. So, the machine had thought the voter had voted for two people and it was an invalid ballot. But, obviously, if somebody votes for Gore twice, the intent of the voter is clear. That should have been counted for Gore. And he never got credit for those votes, because unfortunately, he only asked that the under vote be counted. He didn’t think to ask that the over votes be counted. There were three thousand people who wrote in and exed the box for George Bush, but that was a four thousand net gain for Gore. That would have made all the difference, and we never even knew.”
Richard Winger, editor of Ballot Access News.
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