Mike Pence vented his anger at Donald Trump on Saturday night.
“History will hold Donald Trump responsible for January 6,” Pence declared at the Gridiron Dinner, a usually joyful event for celebrity journalists. “Make no mistake, what happened that day was an embarrassment and it is decency to misrepresent it. President Trump was wrong. His reckless words endangered my family and everyone in the Capitol that day.”
Now Pence is rightly angry about January 6. Trump has put his ultra-loyal vice president in a dire position: be loyal to the president and his base, or be loyal to the constitution and the country.
It was undoubtedly a painful decision for Pence. And Pence did the right thing by refusing to go along with Trump’s plan. But it’s worth remembering that Pence’s Jan. 6 decision came as a shock to many, as he had been a staunch cheerleader for Trump for four years during the president’s myriad scandals.
It’s also worth remembering that it really was the least Pence could do.
While I’m happy and grateful for what he’s done, some of the praise feels over the top. If all your friends decide to rob a bank, but you refuse to go along with it, that’s fine. But it’s not heroism not to rob a bank. After all, not all painful decisions are necessary difficult choices.
That’s what makes his tantrums against Trump so disturbing right now. He says that “history will hold Donald Trump responsible for the events of January 6”. I am convinced he is right. But it will take longer for that to happen because Pence has little interest in finishing the story.
For more than a year, he refrained from expressing his anger at Trump endangering his life and creating a constitutional crisis. Why? It seems hard to believe that he was waiting for new facts, since he was in possession of many of these facts.
Pence wanted nothing to do with the January 6 Committee, insisting it had no right to testify. “I think it would set a terrible precedent for Congress to invite a Vice President of the United States to speak on deliberations that have taken place at the White House,” he said in November.
But when the Justice Department issued a subpoena for his testimony, he found another excuse: He couldn’t help with that investigation because he was a member of the legislature on Jan. 6.
“On the day of Jan. 6, I acted as President of the Senate and presided over a joint session as described in the Constitution itself,” Pence said last month. And so I believe that this speech and debate clause of the Constitution actually prohibits the executive from forcing me to appear in court, as the Constitution says, or wherever. And we’re going to stand on that principle, and we’re going to take the case as far as possible, if necessary to the U.S. Supreme Court, because to me it’s a matter of separation of powers.”
In other words, when the legislature wanted him to explain what he knew, he said he couldn’t because he was a member of the executive branch. When the executive made inquiries, Pence was suddenly a member of the legislature.
Well, on constitutional grounds, no argument is ridiculous. But in short, he’s basically trying to be Schrödinger’s cat of vice presidents.
If he had been genuinely interested in helping the story hold Trump accountable, the Justice Department — or the January 6 commission before it — would certainly have dropped the subpoenas in exchange for his voluntary testimony.
And then there’s the problem of asking “story” – which has a lot on its plate – to do the work it doesn’t want to do. He knows the facts. He knows that since Jan. 6, Trump has requested that the constitution be suspended in order to reinstate himself as president.
While he has not officially stated that he is running for president, his team almost admits that they set the stage and spread the word that he is better placed than Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and the like.
Shouldn’t a person running for president be able to tell the truth and vent his anger without too much back and forth and political calculations?
Source: LA Times