The Electoral Count Act: Insurrection Killer?
The Libertarian
The Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin
4.7 • 994 Ratings
🗓️ 7 January 2022
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | This is the Libertarian Podcast from the Hoover Institution. |
| 0:09.7 | I'm your host Tom Church and the Liberty This is the Libertarian Podcast from the Hoover Institution. |
| 0:13.0 | I'm your host Tom Church, and the Libertarian is Professor Richard Epstein. |
| 0:17.2 | Richard's the Peter and Kirsten Bedford Senior Fellow here at the Hoover Institution. |
| 0:21.5 | He's the Lawrence A Tish Professor of Law at NYU and his senior lecturer at the University of Chicago. |
| 0:27.0 | Richard, as we're recording this, it is January 6, 2022, exactly one year after the Capitol riots following the contentious presidential |
| 0:35.6 | election where President Trump insisted he'd won his re-election bid. |
| 0:40.2 | The thought on everyone's mind today, I think, is what can we do to avoid another January 6th like debacle? |
| 0:46.7 | Our colleague Michael McConnell had a piece in the Washington Post with a few authors, |
| 0:50.4 | co-authors yesterday talking about the Electoral Count Act. I think everyone I've been |
| 0:55.5 | reading on this on the subject has been talking about it and I want to ask you |
| 1:00.7 | about this a little bit more. This is the ECA is it's the law that governs the certification of the presidential vote and as you know it's it was passed back in 1887 hasn't been amended since. |
| 1:11.6 | Can you give us some perspective on how the Electoral |
| 1:14.8 | Count Act fits into our current system and any suggestions you might have on |
| 1:20.0 | well understanding it and then maybe reforming it. |
| 1:23.0 | Well, I'm not going to be brave enough to say that I or anybody else understands it, but I do think it's important to sort of put this into the general context of how it is that presidents are chosen. |
| 1:34.0 | So I'm going to go back to the beginning of all of this and to figure out how it is that we come |
| 1:39.0 | up with an electoral college and then how this thing starts to get transformed over the years. |
| 1:45.0 | And the first thing to understand about the Electoral College is they actually meant what they said and they said what they meant. |
| 1:50.0 | The Electoral College was supposed to be a set of deliberative bodies in each |
| 1:54.6 | state, which essentially decided on how they wish the presidential election to come |
| 1:59.7 | out, and then they would all meet in Washington and they would kind of cast their boat. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from The Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of The Civitas Institute at the University of Texas at Austin and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.