Nancy Pelosi and her fellow Democrats think the events of January 6 are key to beating Donald Trump.
But Pelosi just blew it.
And Nancy Pelosi botched one January 6 question that turned heads across America.
Nancy Pelosi struggled to deal with questions about the Democrat Party’s scheme to allow their party’s judges and election officials to remove Donald Trump’s name from the ballot using Section 3 of the 14th Amendment.
Joe Biden can’t lose the election if Americans can’t vote for Trump.
But Democrats granting themselves the right to decide if the political opposition is allowed to field a candidate and who that candidate will be undercuts Joe Biden’s message that electing him is the only way to protect American democracy.
Pelosi’s inability to thread that needle became clear during an interview with ABC’s “This Week” host George Stephanopoulos.
Stephanopoulos – a former Clinton White House aide – isn’t out to embarrass Democrats or ask them “gotcha” questions.
However, Stephanopoulos asked Pelosi basic questions about the plot to claim Trump led an insurrection on January 6 and if courts and election officials can ban his name from the ballot.
“Do you believe that Donald Trump engaged in insurrection?” Stephanopoulos wondered.
Pelosi stuck with the party line that Trump was an insurrectionist.
“Yes,” Pelosi stated. “I think that he engaged in insurrection. I think that he incited an insurrection. And again, that he would not stop what was going on. As his own people said, ‘This is your legacy. Smoke coming from the Capitol is your legacy.’ Yes, I do believe that.”
Stephanopoulos then followed up by saying if Pelosi believed that to be the case, shouldn’t states ban Trump from the ballot?
“Madam Speaker, if you believe he engaged in insurrection under the plain meaning of the 14th Amendment, you believe he’s ineligible to be president?” Stephanopoulos asked Pelosi.
Pelosi still knows enough to understand this line of reasoning will drag the country into the abyss and tried to claim Democrats weren’t trying to steal the right of the people to vote for Trump since this was a state issue.
“Those are up to the states. They have different laws from state to state,” Pelosi incorrectly responded.
Stephanopoulos retorted by pointing out that she was wrong and that if the 14th Amendment applied to Trump he couldn’t appear on the ballot anywhere since he isn’t eligible to be president.
“It’s the Constitution,” Stephanopoulos responded.
Pelosi knew she was caught and tried to backtrack.
“There is a view of the Constitution in Article 14, Section 3, that he should not be able to run for president,” Pelosi stammered. “But that’s not the point. The point now is, again, different states have different laws. We don’t think in California that it, it applied in our state. That’s what the decision was made here.”
There is no legal justification for banning Trump from the ballot.
And Pelosi understands if the Supreme Court allows these decisions to remove Trump from the Colorado and Maine ballots to stand then the concept of free and fair elections evaporates as Republicans will respond in kind and remove Biden from the ballot in red states for engaging in insurrection by allowing the border to remain open.
But Pelosi also knows Democrats view courts labeling Trump as an insurrectionist as critical to Joe Biden’s message that Trump represents a threat to democracy.