Pence Finally Fights Back - Rob Horowitz

Pence Finally Fights Back - Rob Horowitz

After more than a year of turning the other cheek in the face of persistent attacks from Donald Trump because of his refusal on January 6 to violate the Constitution and reject the electoral votes of a select number of states that voted for Joe Biden, Mike Pence is finally fighting back.

In a speech to The Federalist Society on Friday, the former vice-president remarked, “I heard this week, President Trump said I had the right to ‘overturn the election.’ President Trump is wrong: I had no right to overturn the election. The presidency belongs to the American people and the American people alone. And frankly, there is no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president."

It appears that the recent even more outrageous than usual comments by Mr. Trump about the 2020 election, the events of January 6 and Pence’s supposed betrayal, persuaded the former vice-president that continuing to wait out the former president, hoping that he will turn his attention to something else was more wishful thinking than strategy.  In the last week or so, Donald Trump has said if he is elected in 2024, he will pardon people who were convicted of taking part in the violence on January 6, and that Congressional efforts to clarify and reform the Electoral Count Act somehow mean that Pence did in fact have the power to “overturn the election,” and the January 6 committee should investigate the former vice-president for not doing so, among other choice nuggets.

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Mr. Trump is also ramping up his all-out effort to sanction, defeat or expel Republican elected officials who strongly counter his false assertions.  The Trump-controlled Republican National Committee on Friday, for example, voted to censure Representatives Liz Cheney (WY) and Adam Kinzinger (IL) because of their participation as members of the House select committee investigating January 6 and the events that led up to it.  In what is the latest illustration of a continuing pattern by Trump and his allies to downplay January 6, the resolution calls the people that attacked the Capitol, attempting to block the peaceful transfer of power, “ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”  RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel’s attempt to clean that up after it received widespread criticism was singularly unpersuasive.

Despite these continuing efforts by Mr. Trump and his still dominant influence in the Republican Party, there are signs that the former president’s obsessive focus on the 2020  presidential election is beginning to wear thin among a growing segment of the party  The revelations provided by the House select committee on  nearly a daily basis of new details fleshing out the far-reaching scale of the attempt by the former president to overturn the election are beginning to take a toll. This is backed up by recent public and private polling which shows Trump losing some support among Republicans.  The view that Trump is losing at least some altitude is shared by Pence’s political team and one of the reasons for the timing of the former vice-president’s forceful push back.

While Republican elected officials mainly avoided publicly commenting on Pence’s remarks, the Republicans and conservatives that appeared over the weekend on the Sunday shows, by and large, said the former vice-president was right. Chris Christie, who is mulling another presidential run in 2024, was the strongest in his embrace of Pence’s comments, saying on This Week with George Stephanopoulos, “I think that the actions the vice president took on January 6 spoke loudly. And I'm glad he's finally put words to it. I don't know why it took him so long, but I'm glad that he did.  And let's face it, let’s call this what it is, January 6th was a riot that was incited by Donald Trump in an effort to intimidate Mike Pence and the Congress into doing exactly what he said in his own words last week, overturn the election.”

In his speech, Mike Pence reaffirmed plain truths, including that the vice president’s role on January 6 is limited to opening and counting “the votes submitted and certified by the states" and that January 6 was a “dark day” in our history.  He added, “The truth is there’s more at stake than our party or our political fortunes. If we lose faith in the Constitution, we won’t just lose elections — we’ll lose our country.”

While the impact of Mike Pence’s finally fighting back to his own political future are to be determined, his speech at The Federalist Society was important to the battle to safeguard our democracy.   That is something—no matter how we feel about the former vice-president otherwise-- we should applaud.

 

Rob Horowitz is a strategic and communications consultant who provides general consulting, public relations, direct mail services and polling for national and state issue organizations, various non-profits, businesses, and elected officials and candidates. He is an Adjunct Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island.