By David Harsanyi
Wednesday, November 20, 2019
‘Nancy Pelosi just stated that ‘it is dangerous to let
the voters decide Trump’s fate.’ @FoxNews In other words, she thinks I’m going
to win and doesn’t want to take a chance on letting the voters decide. Like Al
Green, she wants to change our voting system. Wow, she’s CRAZY!” tweeted Donald
Trump Tuesday.
Well, not exactly. Trump’s tweet quotes a Fox News
reporter summarizing Pelosi’s position, not the speaker’s statement verbatim.
Left-wing Twitterverse, of course, was immediately able to jump all over the
president’s clumsy wording and act as if the substance of his contention was
wholly untrue. It wasn’t.
In her Dear
Colleague letter pushing back against Republican anti-impeachment talking
points, Nancy Pelosi wrote this: “The weak response to these hearings has been,
‘Let the election decide.’ That dangerous position only adds to the urgency of
our action, because the President is jeopardizing the integrity of the 2020
elections.” Is he?
If a Republican had suggested that a presidential
election was a “dangerous” notion, he would have triggered around-the-clock
panic-stricken coverage on CNN and a series of deep dives in The Atlantic
lamenting the conservative turn against our sacred democratic ideals.
What Pelosi has done is even more cynical. She’s arguing
that if Democrats fail in their efforts to impeach Trump — and, I assume,
remove him from office — then the very legitimacy of the 2020 election will be
in question before any votes are cast.
Though most liberals have long declared the 2016 contest
contaminated, as far as we know, absolutely nothing — not even the most
successful foreign efforts in “interference” or “meddling” — damaged the
integrity of the election results. Notwithstanding the belief of over 60
percent of Democrats, precipitated by breathless and often misleading media
coverage, not one vote was altered by Putin, nor was a single person’s free
will purloined by a Russian Twitter bot or Facebook ad.
And, contra Pelosi’s implication, whatever you make of
Trump’s request from Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate Joe
Biden’s shady son, not one voter will be restricted from casting a ballot for
whomever they please in 2020. In truth, voters will know more about the inner
workings of Trump’s presidency than they have about any other administration in
memory. Maybe they care, maybe they don’t, but that’s not up to Pelosi.
Rather than safeguarding the integrity of our elections,
Democrats have corroded trust in them. Post-2016 calls for increased control
over speech on the Internet, for instance, pose a far greater danger to
American freedoms than anything our enemies at the Kremlin could cook up. And
if the contention is that the only truly legitimate election is one that is
free of any attempts to mislead voters, as seems to be the case, then we might
as well close up shop. Because the presence of unregulated political rhetoric
is a feature of a free and open society. We will never be able to, nor should
we aspire to, limit discourse.
It shouldn’t be forgotten, either, that this habit of
injecting doubt into the electoral process is nothing new. For the past 20
years (at least), Democrats have shown a destructive inability to accept the
fact that a bunch of voters simply disagree with them. If it’s not “dark money”
boring into their souls, it’s gerrymandering, special interests, confusing
ballots, voter suppression, crafty Ruskies or the Electoral College. Democrats
can’t lose on the merits. Someone, somewhere, has fooled the Proles into making
bad decisions.
All that said, it is Pelosi’s constitutional prerogative
to try to impeach Trump for any reasons she sees fit, even if her goal is only
to weaken the political prospects of her opponent. No, it isn’t a “coup,” but
it’s certainly not a constitutional imperative, either. It’s a political
choice.
In the end, the presidency happens to be one of the
things we do decide via elections. That will almost surely be the case when it
comes Trump, and Pelosi knows it. And when Trump isn’t removed by the
Senate, and if the results don’t go the way Pelosi hopes, she’s
preemptively given Democrats a reason to question the legitimacy of yet another
election.
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