I know you think it’s over. I did too, for a few minutes after the Electoral College voted on Monday. Although marred by death threats, police escorts, and undisclosed locations, state electors confirmed that Joe Biden is president-elect of the United States.
But the drama continues because the fat lady, in the form of Vice President Mike Pence, has not yet sung. He will preside over a joint session of Congress convening on Jan. 6 at which the 535 members of Congress meet to validate the Dec. 14 electors’ tally.
This, in normal times, would be a pro-forma ceremony. But these are not normal times. Trump sees this routine rubber-stamping of Monday’s rubber-stamping of the election as another chance, after weeks of unsuccessful lawsuits and recounts, to reverse the rigged election that the Man Whose Name He Won’t Say stole from him.
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There’s no question Pence will be doing everything he can to please his audience of one. Trump, a quart low on family values, chose then-Indiana Governor Pence, a rock-ribbed evangelical with one wife, normal hair, and Second Corinthians on the tip of his tongue, to balance the ticket and be abjectly subservient after being rescued from almost certain defeat in his bid for re-election as governor.
The joint session is not a free-for-all. There’s a controlling legal authority in an 1877 statute that an expert on the subject, Ohio State University law school professor Edward Foley, calls “archaic, not really well written, and drafted in a hurry.” It was passed, Foley said in a phone interview, “to prevent another crisis like Hayes-Tilden in 1876, when neither candidate would concede to the other and it went on so long it looked like we might have two inaugurations.”
It’s not quite come to that this time, but it could drag out. Scholars call the statute impenetrable, but at a minimum it requires one member from the House and one from the Senate to join together to raise an objection to the certified vote to have a debate and then allows each member five minutes to speak. If the losing side wants to create maximum mischief, the statute doesn’t stop the proceeding cold until five days have elapsed—in this case, a week before inauguration.
There’s rarely been so much controversy over an election—drummed up by Trump though it be—and Foley notes it will be the first time the law will really be tested given that mostly symbolic gestures in the past have fizzled quickly.
So far this go-round, one ardent Trump acolyte, Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks, announced on Lou Dobbs after Monday’s vote that he’ll be the House objector and would force a floor vote on “this systematically flawed election.”
He has lots of support, including Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who signed on along with 125 other members of his caucus to a ludicrous unconstitutional lawsuit by the Texas Attorney General and 17 others to get votes thrown out in four swing states. Rehearsing for Jan. 6, Pence, who’d been relatively quiet since the election, sprinted to the stage at an airport rally last Friday in support of the challenge bellowing “God Bless Texas.”
God did not, in the way Pence hoped, but that won’t curb Pence’s enthusiasm for his star turn that has to go well if he’s to have Trump’s good will for his presidential run. Like the vice president, most elected Republicans remained scared to death of Trump with no other party leader in sight and want to stay on his good side. That’s gotten slightly more complicated since Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell congratulated Biden after Monday’s vote and told his caucus not to walk the last mile with the president.
But that shouldn’t hamper Brooks finding his other. He can swipe right on the Senate directory and find any number of potential accomplices whose interests diverge from McConnell’s. Mitch doesn’t see a president in the mirror when he knots his tie; nor does he fear a primary instigated by Trump. For others, it’s safer to be a hero to 25 percent of the party furious to the point of violence over Trump being cheated than to abandon him now.
In any event it only takes one of 52 to make a matched set to meet the requirement of a lawmaker from each chamber. Among them, there are dead-enders like Senators Jim Inhofe, John Kennedy, and Marsha Blackburn, hanging on like dug-in Japanese soldiers doubting the veracity of the 1945 surrender. Sen. Ted Cruz is so devoted to the cause he would be preparing his argument in the Texas case if the Supreme Court hadn’t tossed it out like a hot tamale.
My money was initially on Wisconsin’s Sen. Ron Johnson. He’s so willing to do Trump’s dirty work, he investigated Hunter Biden’s laptop during the campaign as if voters in Green Bay were interested in its whereabouts. He couldn’t wait for Jan. 6 so Monday, Johnson, who is up for re-election in 2022, opened a hearing into “irregularities” in the most corrupt election ever.
He went nuclear, claiming his Democratic committee co-chair “lied” about him. That’s just not done. He’d be perfect for Pence’s show but said Wednesday he wouldn’t be the one to sign up. But aspiring presidential candidate Sen. Josh Hawley said he was considering it: “Every senator has got to make up his or her own mind” and do what they think best represents their constituents. “We’ll see.”
The televised show Pence will be emceeing has little chance of pulling off a coup, even if it goes the full five days. With 59 lawsuits lost, it’s highly unlikely Trump’s going to come up with anything better than the bookies had him winning at 10 p.m. election night.
Trump’s goal now is not to be seen as a loser but a fighter, and as a mongo fundraiser to be reckoned with, collecting $200 million as a lame duck and pocketing 75 percent of it for himself.
To those unimpressed by his political prowess, he brandishes his power to drive out anyone who doesn’t keep doing precisely as he says, like Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Attorney General Bill Barr at Justice. He’ll keep going until he finds someone who will name a special counsel to hunt down his successor’s sole surviving son to satisfy his burning need to haunt Biden’s days living in his house.
Pence’s job in his remaining days in office are comparatively simple: to keep bowing and scraping to Trump with a particularly unctuous deference. He passed his first test standing by his man after the Access Hollywood tape. More than once he’s called charges concerning Stormy Daniels “baseless,” when Michael Cohen went to jail because they weren’t. He covered for Trump when he cancelled going to a World War II commemoration in Poland, citing Hurricane Dorian, which Trump monitored, if at all, from a golf cart.
He cemented his image as a sycophant when the moment Trump put his water bottle down on the floor at a meeting, Pence immediately did the same thing. It went viral. He enriched Trump personally when at his suggestion he stayed at one of his hotels in Ireland with $1,000 a night rooms that happened to be 180 miles from the meetings he had to attend. All that’s left is for Pence to get through the final episode of Trump’s presidential show. The show must go on for, as always, Trump will be watching.
