Skip to content
Search

Latest Stories

Top Stories

Trump puts fresh pressure on Pence to break the rules and upend the election

Vice President Mike Pence

Vice President Pence has tried, unsuccessfully, to explain his role in counting the electoral votes to President Trump.

Megan Varner

President Trump on Tuesday ratcheted up the pressure on Vice President Pence to join in his unprecedented plot to so discredit democracy that they purloin themselves a second term.

Pence continued to remain quiet and out of sight, a day ahead of the joint session of Congress to formally tabulate the 306 legally certified electoral votes making Joe Biden the 46th president and Kamala Harris the 49th vice president. Pence is supposed to preside in his role as president of the Senate and his office made definitive only Tuesday morning that he will show up at the Capitol on Wednesday afternoon.

"The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors," Trump declared falsely on Tuesday, magnifying on Twitter the wholly incorrect belief that Pence can wield his gavel at will to overturn the results of the election.


"Totally untrue," William & Mary law professor Rebecca Green said. "That's just now how the law works."

Trump's tweet about Pence came half an hour after another tweet urging his supporters to come to Washington to protest the Electoral College count, essentially seditious calls by an incumbent president to disrupt the orderly ascension of his successor. Thousands of his allies are already in town, many thousands more are expected, and the D.C. National Guard has been mobilized to keep order.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

On Monday night Trump used the final rally of the 2020 campaign — meant to excite supporters in Georgia ahead of twin Senate elections that will decide the partisan balance of power at the Capitol — to apply another measure of public arm-twisting on the vice president.

"I hope Mike Pence comes through for us, I have to tell you," Trump told the crowd, which responded with cheers. "Of course, if he doesn't come through, I won't like him as much."

Pence has made sometimes obsequious loyalty to his boss the defining characteristic of his term. Unless he chooses to duck the moment, the House and Senate meeting to count the votes will put him at the center of the clear choice facing every Republican in the room — between continued fealty to Trump or a sworn duty to uphold the Constitution.

A law enacted in 1877, which sets the rules for the day, makes clear Pence has no choice but to take the second course. The presiding officer's role is that of a master of ceremonies, not an arbiter of disputes. He helps open the envelopes containing the electoral votes of the 50 states and announce their contents. He assigns the House and Senate to spend two hours debating any challenges supported by at least one lawmaker from each chamber. He announces their decisions and, when the disputes are ended, he announces the electoral vote grand totals.

Pence is expected to carry out the script and has not said or done anything to signal he will exceed his limited authority by siding with the Trump loyalists working to delay and disrupt the count with unfounded claims against the integrity of the electoral votes in five states central to Biden's victory.

The vice president "shares the concerns of millions of Americans about voter fraud and irregularities in the last election," his office said in a statement last week, and "welcomes the efforts of members of the House and Senate to use the authority they have under the law to raise objections and bring forward evidence before the Congress and the American people on January 6th."

Should Pence decide at the final hour not to appear (or when he steps of the podium during a session that may well stretch into Thursday morning) the gavel would be taken by the longest serving GOP senator, Chuck Grassley of Iowa. Something similar hasn't happened since 1969, when Vice President Hubert Humphrey attended a foreign dignitary's funeral overseas rather than announce that he'd lost to Richard Nixon.

In recent weeks, Trump has become keenly interested in the presiding officer's role but still does not understand it. Last month, he signaled his approval when GOP Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas filed a quickly dismissed lawsuit designed to get Pence to overturn the election results. Aboard Air Force One on his way to Florida for Christmas, he retweeted a supporter's entreaty for Pence to refuse to accept the Electoral College results.

Pence — who went to the Capitol on Sunday to meet with Senate Parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough — has reportedly sought to explain the process to the president in hopes of diffusing the pressure on him, which clearly has not worked. Pence and Trump met in the Oval Office on Monday just before the president headed to Georgia.

Read More

Podcast: How do police feel about gun control?

Podcast: How do police feel about gun control?

Jesus "Eddie" Campa, former Chief Deputy of the El Paso County Sheriff's Department and former Chief of Police for Marshall Texas, discusses the recent school shooting in Uvalde and how loose restrictions on gun ownership complicate the lives of law enforcement on this episode of YDHTY.

Listen now

Podcast: Why conspiracy theories thrive in both democracies and autocracies

Podcast: Why conspiracy theories thrive in both democracies and autocracies

There's something natural and organic about perceiving that the people in power are out to advance their own interests. It's in part because it’s often true. Governments actually do keep secrets from the public. Politicians engage in scandals. There often is corruption at high levels. So, we don't want citizens in a democracy to be too trusting of their politicians. It's healthy to be skeptical of the state and its real abuses and tendencies towards secrecy. The danger is when this distrust gets redirected, not toward the state, but targets innocent people who are not actually responsible for people's problems.

On this episode of "Democracy Paradox" Scott Radnitz explains why conspiracy theories thrive in both democracies and autocracies.

Your Take:  The Price of Freedom

Your Take: The Price of Freedom

Our question about the price of freedom received a light response. We asked:

What price have you, your friends or your family paid for the freedom we enjoy? And what price would you willingly pay?

It was a question born out of the horror of images from Ukraine. We hope that the news about the Jan. 6 commission and Ketanji Brown Jackson’s Supreme Court nomination was so riveting that this question was overlooked. We considered another possibility that the images were so traumatic, that our readers didn’t want to consider the question for themselves. We saw the price Ukrainians paid.

One response came from a veteran who noted that being willing to pay the ultimate price for one’s country and surviving was a gift that was repaid over and over throughout his life. “I know exactly what it is like to accept that you are a dead man,” he said. What most closely mirrored my own experience was a respondent who noted her lack of payment in blood, sweat or tears, yet chose to volunteer in helping others exercise their freedom.

Personally, my price includes service to our nation, too. The price I paid was the loss of my former life, which included a husband, a home and a seemingly secure job to enter the political fray with a message of partisan healing and hope for the future. This work isn’t risking my life, but it’s the price I’ve paid.

Sign up for The Fulcrum newsletter

Given the earnest question we asked, and the meager responses, I am also left wondering if we think at all about the price of freedom? Or have we all become so entitled to our freedom that we fail to defend freedom for others? Or was the question poorly timed?

I read another respondent’s words as an indicator of his pacifism. And another veteran who simply stated his years of service. And that was it. Four responses to a question that lives in my heart every day. We look forward to hearing Your Take on other topics. Feel free to share questions to which you’d like to respond.

Keep ReadingShow less
No, autocracies don't make economies great

libre de droit/Getty Images

No, autocracies don't make economies great

Tom G. Palmer has been involved in the advance of democratic free-market policies and reforms around the globe for more than three decades. He is executive vice president for international programs at Atlas Network and a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.

One argument frequently advanced for abandoning the messy business of democratic deliberation is that all those checks and balances, hearings and debates, judicial review and individual rights get in the way of development. What’s needed is action, not more empty debate or selfish individualism!

In the words of European autocrat Viktor Orbán, “No policy-specific debates are needed now, the alternatives in front of us are obvious…[W]e need to understand that for rebuilding the economy it is not theories that are needed but rather thirty robust lads who start working to implement what we all know needs to be done.” See! Just thirty robust lads and one far-sighted overseer and you’re on the way to a great economy!

Keep ReadingShow less