The Last Stand of Mike Pence.
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“Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Lord Acton, English historian.
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IF ALL of that material, from the first two congressional hearings, just summarized, wasn’t enough to wake the slumbering MAGA faithful, testimony wasn’t going to get better anytime soon.
If you loved Trump, the third hearing was grim.
(So?
Just don’t watch, right!)
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Trump loved Pence until Pence saved the U.S. Constitution. |
“This may be the most important thing I ever say.”
Once again, all the witnesses were Trump people, telling a story, under oath. Marc Short, chief of staff to Vice President Mike Pence, said he conveyed his doubts about the stolen election “many times,” to the White House.
Short said that on January 4, 2021, Dr. John Eastman, a central figure in Team Trump’s plot to reject electoral votes from states Trump lost, and overturn election results, admitted that the scheme he was helping hatch would be illegal, if carried out. In any case, Vice President Pence had made it clear. He was going to refuse to put aside any votes. As Mr. Pence and his legal team prepared a final statement, he remarked, “This may be the most important thing I ever say.”
Greg Jacob, a lawyer on Pence’s staff, said Mr. Pence never wavered. Trump and Eastman were arguing that the U.S. Constitution gave a vice president power, when counting electoral votes, to set aside any he might want.
“There was no way,” that the Founding Fathers, who “abhorred concentrated power, who had broken away from the tyranny of George III, would ever have put one person, particularly not a person who had a direct interest,” Jacob said, “in a role to have decisive impact on the outcome of the election.”
Frankly, Jacob testified, it was “just common sense.”
(Eastman was arguing that Pence could gift himself a second term.)
Judge J. Michael Luttig, a former federal judge, appointed by President George H. W. Bush, was a star witness. Vice President Pence had sought out the highly respected conservative jurist for advice.
Rep. Liz Cheney, one of only two Republicans willing to serve on the congressional panel, asked Luttig to explain what he meant by a sentence in an op-ed he had written the day before: “Had the Vice President obeyed the President of the United States, America would have immediately been plunged into what would have been tantamount to a revolution within a paralyzing Constitutional crisis.”
“The simple foundational truth.”
Luttig spoke slowly and with care, so that some who watched came away calling his testimony “boring.”
The judge understood the gravity of the moment and intended to be precise. “The most foundational principle,” he said, the rule of law, “the profound truth,” “the simple foundational truth” of the Republic had been placed at grave risk. Not by Democrats and not as a result of voter fraud.
The President of the United States was a threat.
The question before “the panel and the nation,” Luttig warned, was that Mr. Pence had been pressured to ignore that truth on January 6. Had he done so, the nation would have been “plunged,” he said again, “into the first constitutional crisis since the founding of the nation” in 1789.
Judge Luttig testified under oath.
Even Dr. Eastman admitted, witnesses said, that Trump’s and his plan to have Mr. Pence ignore the electoral votes of several states, would be “dead on arrival in Congress,” if announced.
Fake slates of electors did exist – and as part of the plot were to be trotted out, but only at the last minute.
(This would make it hard for the legislative or judicial branches to thwart the plot.)
None of the seven fake slates had been certified by the legislatures of those states. Judge Luttig testified that there was no way, “frankly, ever,” that the Constitution granted a vice president power to count non-certified electoral votes. Luttig referred to what he described as the “sacred counting,” of the votes. There was, he said, “No basis…at all…none [emphasis added, unless otherwise noted],” to support Dr. Eastman’s contention. Pence in no way had the power to overturn the count.
“Are you out of your f**king mind.”
Jacob testified to the same point. In a meeting with Eastman, he stressed what should have been obvious. No vice president in American history had ever attempted such a ploy. Al Gore, if such power had existed, could have declared victory for himself in 2001.
Even Dr. Eastman “acknowledged that Al Gore did not and should not have that authority at that point in time.” Vice President Biden could have tipped the 2016 election Hillary’s way, as well.
Mr. Short testified that White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows admitted “a couple of times,” that he knew Pence had no such authority.
Jason Miller, who still works for Trump, and claimed publicly that the election had been stolen, whistled a different lullaby under oath. Miller knew that White House Chief Counsel Pat Cipollone believed the idea that Pence could ignore the votes “was nutty and at one point confronted Eastman, basically, with the same sentiment.”
At that point, Cipollone had not agreed to testify, because Trump was claiming executive privilege – which is real – and legally defensible. Short added that Cipollone had expressed his admiration for Pence. Eric Herschmann, another White House lawyer, had also chimed in: “It made no sense” that the VP could choose the winner, as Trump – the loser – now said. Miller was under oath. So he had to speak true. As far as Eastman’s arguments went, Cipollone and others “thought he was crazy…his theory was crazy, there was no validity,” Miller said.
Herschmann had a more pungent response. “Are you out of your f**king mind,” he asked Dr. Eastman.
Even at Fox News, reality was sinking in – although that was not the stew they served up to hungry viewers for daily consumption. In one message to White House staff, sent in the weeks after the election, Sean Hannity feared that the president would soon lose the entire White House legal shop.
On January 5, 2021, White House lawyers confronted Eastman again. He admitted that if his plan for Pence to overturn the vote ever reached the U.S. Supreme Court, it would lose 7-2.
He hesitated a moment, and then admitted, okay, it would “lose 9-0.”
(Eastman knew Eastman was lying; he’s indicted in Georgia, too.)
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Until now, VP Pence had been a loyal member of the administration. He just wouldn't break the law. |
“A pretty obvious
choice.”
As the days passed, and the courts shot down one legal challenge after another, honest voices quit or fell silent. Team Trump was reduced to the craziest members of the crew. You had the vociferous Mike Lindell, who kept insisting divine magic would occur, and Trump would be inaugurated on January 20, 2021. You had Gen. Michael T. Flynn, who was pushing for the president to send tanks to blue states and compel a new vote. And you had Giuliani, who would, on January 6, itself, call the plan for Pence to overturn the electoral count “perfectly legal.”
Which none of the witnesses before Congress had said was close to the truth.
(Flynn and Giuliani will “testify” later – in an entirely different fashion.)
Judge Luttig called the plan “the blueprint to overturn the outcome of the 2020 election.” He said Eastman, the president, and the few remaining holdouts, “got wrapped around the axle” of logic and couldn’t extricate themselves. He testified, live, and under oath, that had he been advising any vice president, John Adams in 1797, Thomas Jefferson in 1801, Richard Nixon in 1961, and now Pence (who did seek advice), he “would have laid his body across the road” to stop Team Trump. “The centerpiece of the plot,” he said, was “constitutional mischief.”
He was understating for once.
Of course, we know the MAGA crowd will insist: Well, what about Al Gore in 2000! Gore did challenge results in court. He did. But with far greater justification. Victory in 2000 hinged on a single state: Florida. The margin was 537 votes. So Democrats did go to court – and when they lost, 5-4, in the U.S. Supreme Court, Gore conceded. He didn’t spend his remaining time in office screaming that the fix was in.
Nor did he spend every day of George W. Bush’s first term howling about how the 2000 election was “rigged.”
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