"... ...A little after midnight, Donald Trump apparently saw something on Fox News that inspired him to publish a tweet: “Nancy Pelosi just stated that ‘it is dangerous to let the v**ers decide Trump’s fate.’ … In other words, she thinks I’m going to win and doesn’t want to take a chance on letting the v**ers decide.”
The president added, “Wow, she’s CRAZY!”
This morning, Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), who really ought to know better, picked up on Trump’s line, publishing a similarly misguided missive: “Speaker of the U.S. House of [sic] says its ‘dangerous’ to ‘let the e******n decide’ if [the president] should remain in office. T***slation? ‘We can’t trust backwards, uneducated, everyday people to decide the Presidency, this must be decided by the enlightened people in Washington D.C.’”
"Since this is apparently poised to be the Republican Party's new toy, it's worth pausing to shine a light on reality. Yesterday afternoon, around 2 p.m. (ET), Speaker Pelosi sent a letter to House members on the congressional impeachment inquiry. It read in part:
"... ... The facts are uncontested: that the President abused his power for his own personal, political benefit, at the expense of our national security interests.
"The weak response to these hearings has been, 'Let the e******n decide.' That dangerous position only adds to the urgency of our action,
because the President is jeopardizing the integrity of the 2020 e******ns."Even those with modest reading-comprehension sk**ls can see Pelosi did not write what Trump and Rubio claimed.
On the contrary, the Speaker raised an important point that Trump, Rubio, and other Republicans have struggled to address.
As we discussed last week, a variety of prominent GOP voices -- former Ambassador Nikki Haley, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Texas), et al. -- have made the case that lawmakers should skip impeachment proceedings and simply allow the 2020 e******n to decide Trump's fate. If the American e*****rate has a problem with Trump's abuses, they can choose someone new. If v**ers are unmoved by the president's corruption, they make that clear, too.
The trouble, of course, is the nature of the scandal itself. One of the key pillars of the whole controversy has been a simple fact: Trump intended to c***t in the e******n by way of an extortion scheme. The president, rightly or wrongly, saw Joe Biden as a credible e*******l threat, which led him to push a vulnerable foreign ally to cook up some dirt Republicans could use before E******n Day... ..."
http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/losing-the-debate-trump-rubio-run-manipulated-pelosi-quote"... ...A little after midnight, Donald Trump... (