CNN’s Don Lemon on Tuesday tried to walk back his call to “blow up the entire system” if President Donald Trump successfully appoints another Supreme Court justice.
After facing considerable backlash, the controversy-courting anchor claimed that his remarks were “taken out of context” during a show hand-off to fellow anchor Chris Cuomo.
“I woke up and I saw all of these headlines—‘Don Lemon is calling for the abolishing of the Electoral College!’—but I was responding to you when you said we need people with integrity,” Lemon told Cuomo.
“I was responding to you when you said we want people with integrity in office, and I said, ‘Well, then we’ve got to blow up the whole system, right?’ And I said here’s what Democrats can do and that’s the danger: they can stack the court.”
But during his segment earlier this week, Lemon did not once specify that he was referring to Democrats’ options. Instead, he said quite clearly: “We’re going to have to blow up the entire system,” to which Cuomo responded, “I don’t know about that.”
Even after being corrected by Cuomo, Lemon continued to argue that Democrats could block Republicans from gaining power ever again.
“You’re going to have to get rid of the Electoral College,” he said. “Because the minority in this country get to decide who our judges are and who our president is. Is that fair?”
Lemon later claimed that he was never “calling for the abolishing of the Electoral College.”
Instead, he meant that “the American people,” not just Democrats, could decide to change the electoral system if they wanted to.
He then added that perhaps the Electoral College should be destroyed after all, because “it disenfranchises voters, both Democrats and Republicans.”
“Should it be abolished? It’s not for me to say,” Lemon continued. “I’m saying this is what Democrats are saying: stack the courts, get rid of the Electoral College. But there is no nuance and no context anymore, so who cares.”
Despite Lemon’s false claim, the reality is, in fact, that abolishing the Electoral College would result in voters across the nation—regardless of their own state’s voting laws and safeguards of voting integrity—being subject to the notoriously fraud-plagued systems of populous blue states like California and New York.
Those states, in turn, could continue to increase their pull on the national outcome by unilaterally refusing to abide by voting restrictions that bar non-citizens and other ineligible individuals from voting.
Already, San Francisco has allowed non-citizens to vote in local elections and is considering lowering the voting age to 16.
Other states have laws varying on the eligibility of incarcerated felons, as well as different law dictating how voting is administered.
