MSNBC "The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell" - Transcript: Interview with Madeleine Dean

Interview

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Joining us now is Democratic Congresswoman Madeleine Dean of Pennsylvania. She was an impeachment manager in the second impeachment trial of Donald Trump because, as we said at the top, there were two, so you have to distinguish between the two impeachments of the former president.

Congresswoman, how do you marginalize the leaders within the Republican Party who are, as I said, feeding their base these lies that are sometimes resulting in political violence, but certainly resulting in sickness and death when it comes to COVID?

REP. MADELEINE DEAN (D-PA): Good evening, Zerlina. I`m pleased to be with you, but these topics couldn`t be more troubling. And of course I`m delighted to be in the company of Eric Swalwell. He and I served as impeachment managers together on impeachment number two.

What I`m struck by this week and I will get to your question about marginalization, but what I`m struck by this week is the image of the fencing going back up. Capitol police are forced to put fences back up to protect us, members of Congress, our staff, and themselves from the lies that are coming from within.

A lot of people might think we`re putting the fences up because we had to protect ourselves from a possible attack as we suffered on January the 6th that I was a part -- that I was witness to and witness -- victim of, frankly.

But really, think about it. The image is absolutely perverse. It is the lies that are coming from within that are requiring these fences. If elected leaders like those on the fringe, Madison Cawthorn and others, would stop the lies, we would have no need for this fencing. If leaders, Republicans, would actually call out and say, this was a free and fair election. There was absolutely no evidence of important fraud.

It was a handful of cases, countable literally number of cases. No measurable fraud in this election, and the president is the president in a free and fair election. How do we continue to marginalize them? I think they`re continuing to marginalize themselves. Eric was talking about his experience this week in California with the recall.

You saw what is going on here in Pennsylvania. The Pennsylvania state senate has passed legislation that would subpoena the records of 7 million voters in Pennsylvania. I happen to represent the fourth congressional district.

My Republican moderate voters are not happy about this kind of a subpoena for their personal records. I think the Republicans are doing it to themselves. It`s a very, very sad set of circumstances.

MAXWELL: Are the voters or your voters going to be able to make their voices heard on that point? Because part of the problem post-2020, as you know, is the sham audit in Arizona that`s seemingly contagious like a virus that`s spreading to states like Pennsylvania where they`re trying to change the rules for how the votes are counted after the fact, changing the power of the secretary of state in Arizona, for example. And I feel like they`re going to say and do whatever they want if they implement rules that don`t allow us to vote them out if we don`t like that.

DEAN: Well, you`re absolutely right. Elections are everything, and that`s what we have to do here in Pennsylvania. We have to do it all across the country. The thing that`s going on here in Pennsylvania as I said, my own constituents are very, very upset about it, Democrats and Republicans.

Is that the Senate has said that they are hiring -- they want to hire a third party unnamed vendor who would subpoena all of our records, my records, anybody else who was a registered voter in Pennsylvania, and they would have access not just to our voter registration, they`d have access to our license numbers. They`d have access to parts of our social security numbers.

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Republicans don`t like this, Democrats don`t like this. It`s literally un- American, unconstitutional, but it is what a shrinking Republican Party is up to. It will be up to us, it will be up to the voters to vote out such people. You know, this whole thing began five or six years ago with a lie and a wall, and here we are. I hope we are at the end of it where we are, again, with a lie, the big lie that they need to tear down and call back.

It`s a lie and a fence, and so it`s time for this to end. Democrats are focused on something much more important, and you`ve seen what we`ve accomplished. We`ve helped our country recover from an economic collapse and shutdown. We kept us from the brink of any kind of a depression. And instead we have a robust economy that is coming back with growing jobs. We are building back better as the Republicans shrink and require us to put fences up to protect our democracy.

MAXWELL: Congresswoman Madeleine Dean, thank you so much for being here on this Friday night and for joining us. Please stay safe.

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