Appearing on Meet the Press Sunday, Princeton University professor and frequent MSNBC guest Eddie Glaude urged Congressional Democrats to “uphold their Constitutional responsibility,” clearly implying that he was talking about starting impeachment hearings. In addition, Glaude resurrected some conspiracy theories about Republicans only winning competitive elections last year by resorting to sinister practices.
The panel discussion began with a focus on an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll finding that only 30 percent of Democrats and 28 percent of Democratic primary voters want Congress to start impeachment hearings. The Wall Street Journal’s Gerald Seib and Politico’s Eliana Johnson agreed that President Trump “wants Democrats to try to impeach him.”
TODD: Eddie, it does seem as if the Democratic base…it’s funny, it’s like, and I’ve said the Presidential candidates talk to voters, which may be why they’re in one place. The Congressional Democrats probably hear social media voters more and, and social media Democrats are in another place. What do they do?
EDDIE GLAUDE: They uphold their constitutional responsibility.
TODD: Okay. What is that?
GLAUDE: That’s, and that is they have to assert the role and responsibility of the Congress for oversight. They have to. Listen, we are…we have to make a distinction between the bad actor that is Donald Trump and an argument that we have been facing since Nixon over…about a unitary executive. There are actors in this current drama that are in some ways the children of many of those folks who participated in the Nixon era. So Bill Barr is a protege of Dick Cheney. We saw the argument in 1992 with regards to Iran-Contra. We know that there’s been an argument about unconstrained executive power. Congress, if they let this go, and I made this critique with Barack Obama and all of his executive orders and the like, if they let this go, the basic, the basic structure of our Constitutional framework, right, is…will collapse in some ways. And so I think it’s important that they walk and chew gum at the same time. They got to be…they got to uphold their oath.
Apparently, Glaude fits into the 17 percent of Americans who want impeachment hearings to begin now, according to the NBC/Wall Street Journal poll.
Eventually, the conversation turned to Russian interference in the 2016 election; with Todd reading aloud some data from the aforementioned poll showing a strong partisan divide between Democrats and Republicans regarding fear of interference in future elections. Republican pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson suggested that Republicans are overwhelmingly “not worried” about future election interference because they resent the fact that they “are being told you didn’t really want to vote for Donald Trump, you only voted for Donald Trump because Putin put something on Facebook that brainwashed you.”
Anderson stressed that “voting machines weren’t hacked,” then Glaude argued that “there was something that happened in Florida.”
GLAUDE: I think it’s important that there is, of course there is a question around the legitimacy of, of Donald Trump’s presidency, but I do think this. There is the case in which we need to ask the question about our, the 2020 elections. Not only are we concerned, at least those of us on the left, concerned about Russia, we’re also concerned by this fact, the 1982 consent decree, right, that prevented the Republican, the RNC, from orchestrating what particularly happened, say, in Georgia with Stacey Abrams or what happened in North Carolina. There are these converging factors that are leading some folk to assume that the question…that the election itself could be in jeopardy, particularly because we have someone in the office who is prone to cheat.
The facts tell a different story. As The Wall Street Journal editorial board pointed out, “minority turnout surged in 2018, notably in Georgia and Florida.” It looks like no matter what the empirical evidence shows, Glaude and other liberals will not let go of the myths surrounding Trump-Russia collusion and voter suppression.
