Ben Sheehan: OMG WTF Does the Constitution Actually Say? | Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO)

first up he is the author of omg what the does the cotton well wtf does the constitution actually say a non-boring guide to how our democracy is supposed to work ben sheehan [Music] ben don't you get near me alone i promise no i'm just kidding so uh listen i'm so glad you're here and i i really mispronounced it i said omg and then i went right to what the but it's wtf and those letters don't even really correspond to what we think they are although it works both ways obviously oh my god what the but it's also ohio michigan georgia wisconsin texas florida because those are the key states right you go okay so we have a lot in common theme wise we've both been on and on for a long time i have anyway i know about this problem we have in america that you are such the perfect guest to walk us through which is we're on the honor system so much that we depend on has not actually been written down in law or the constitution and now we have someone who has no honor puts his family in office gets help from foreign countries runs a business empire while he's president things we didn't think we had to write down right so my worry now is that the electoral college it's not actually written down that the electors which really elect the president go to the guy who gets the most votes in the state right i mean to start it's you only have you know you have 17 states that don't bind their electors uh including states like pennsylvania and georgia and texas make them follow the popular vote in the state so that's one thing that's not written down they leave it up to the states and that's what the supreme court decision earlier this year said that it is constitutional to have a faithless elector laws and also for states to decide not to have that but so much of the electoral college is is is said in the constitution but a lot of the actual process that's going to happen over the next two months is set by federal law and even the federal law that describes it people could barely understand um this section 15 written in 1887 is is constantly debated it's almost unintelligible and so my worry is if we get to this point where we have the electoral count that happens on january 6th there's going to be disputes and it could go haywire what is the likelihood though that some state at least one state does not send to the electoral college to meet to actually elect the president does not send electors that represent who won that state do you think that's a high pop i don't think it's a high probability but i've thought a lot of things over the last four years didn't have a high probability that it's happening so well one thing we know for sure the one thing we know for sure is that however much trump loses by and look i was not sanguine last time and i'm not this time but this time you know last time i did not predict he would win he would lose this time i'm saying he will lose but that's just the popular vote and probably the electoral college what i know will not happen is the next day donald trump saying i congratulate joe biden and i've instructed my staff to make a smooth transition the best man won and this is our system that will never happen right no that will not happen so he'll lose big and then go ape about that is my prediction what will apeshit entail well my worry is is less that his ape and more of the people who are around him who know the system because what's going to happen over the next few weeks is you have obviously the election on november 3rd but then you have until december 8th if there's a if there's a controversy in a state or there's a recount um or claims of male voter fraud or whatever it is there is this opportunity for states to choose to to decide a different way to appoint the electors and as long as they act on it by december 8th they could make it go differently from the popular vote so we have to pay attention to our state legislators in that period to make sure that they follow the popular vote in the state so that we don't have a popular vote in the state that's different from the electors you

Channel: Real Time with Bill Maher

Views: 344,408

Keywords: Matthew McConaughey, Oscar, Golden Globe, actor, Greenlights, Ben Sheehan, award-winning, Funny or Die, OMG WTF, author, OMG WTF Does The Constitution Actually Say?, Heidi Heitkamp, Democrat, U.S. Senator, North Dakota, One Country Project, Anthony Scaramucci, White House Communications Director, President Trump, Trump The Blue-Collar President

Id: 6tCHo_AaeAs

Length: 4min 26sec (266 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 24 2020

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