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Block Trump at Electoral College?

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A Democratic lawmaker is desperately lobbying the Electoral College to shun Donald Trump, and vote for Hillary Clinton — even though he conceded Monday that the Republican won the election “fair and square.”

The plea from Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.) comes a week before the Dec. 19 vote, which is expected to affirm the results of the Nov. 8 election, in which Trump beat Clinton with 306 Electoral College votes.

“We’re 5 wks from Inauguration & the President Elect is completely unhinged. The electoral college must do what it was designed for,” Himes wrote Sunday night on Twitter in response to Trump’s gripe that NBC “Nightly News” is “biased, inaccurate and bad, point after point.”

In an interview Monday on CNN’s “New Day,” Himes said that Trump’s refusal to say that the Russians hacked Democrats during the election was what prompted his plea to the Electoral College.

“What finally pushed me over the edge was when the president-elect of the United States criticized the CIA and the intelligence community. Can you imagine what the leaders in Beijing and Moscow and Tehran are thinking as they watch the next president of the United States delegitimize and criticize his own intelligence community and stand up for the defense of Russia, one of our prime adversaries,” said Himes.

The Democratic rep said the move would result in “an awful lot of litigation,” but that it was the right thing to do under the system that currently exists.

“The Electoral College, if you read the Federalist Papers and understand why it is there, it is a group of people. It is not an algorithm. It is not a set of ballots. It is a group of people that our Founding Fathers, you know, to whom supposedly we all sort of defer to, pledged the idea that if someone gets elected that is manifestly ill equipped to be president … that the Electoral College can step in,” he said.

Himes, who said the Republican isn’t qualified to be “mayor of a small town in Connecticut,” admitted that “under the rules, President-elect Donald Trump won fair and square.”

But Himes, who wants to abolish the Electoral College, said the only reason it does exist is to prevent someone like Trump from getting into the Oval Office.

Source: Daniel Halper, nypost.com