Mike Pence wants our sympathy for the situation he finds himself in as he presides over the final step in certifying the election Joe Biden indisputably won. If he does as Donald Trump wants and rejects the Electoral College vote, he would destroy democracy in the United States and throw the country into chaos not seen since the Civil War.
The U.S Code will keep Pence from succeeding—he’s officially there to open envelopes and tally the already certified votes—but it won’t stop him from trying. He issued a statement over the weekend that he “welcomes the efforts of members... to raise objections and bring forward evidence.”
Fact is there’s been no evidence of fraud dug up over the last two months, despite Trump’s singular attention to finding some. Instead the efforts confirmed the most secure balloting in history: counted, recounted, audited, and surviving 61 court challenges. The argument the insurrectionists make is dizzying, alleging that there are allegations of irregularities that must be examined because Trump has alleged them and they’ve made his 74 million voters angry. They are asking for a 10-day audit of election returns in “disputed states” whose electors they will reject until it is completed. That gets us dangerously close to Inauguration Day.
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What’s a servile vice president to do? He could announce he has no choice but to discharge his ministerial duties, hasten the proceedings along, and refuse to entertain objections to every elector in every state where Trump sees dead people voting. Or Pence could roll all the objections into one big ball, dispose of them, and declare in language the reality star could understand: “You’re fired.”
Not a chance. When the gavel sounds at 1pm in the joint session of Congress, the vice president, who once stayed 180 miles from meetings abroad to divert taxpayer money into a Trump hotel, will go as far as Trump’s advisers tell him to, especially having been warned by Trump at a rally in Georgia on the eve of two Senate runoff elections that he won’t love him anymore if he doesn’t do as ordered.
That means giving a green light to proceed to the Dirty Dozen plus one, led by Josh Hawley, the Jared Kushner of the Senate, and Ted Cruz, whose wife Trump called ugly and whose father he accused of taking part in the assassination of JFK. They were not deterred by the publication in The Washington Post of the tape of a call—as “perfect” as the one in which he shook down the Ukrainian president—from Trump to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in which he urged the official to “find” the 11,870 votes needed to flip the state.
Is there any doubt left that Trump isn’t a president who commits a crime now and then, like Nixon, but a career criminal who ended up president? A large chunk of Trump’s Cabinet departments are brimming with Teapot Dome-size scandals; he lies as he breathes, kept a 20-20 view into his businesses, and so much more. But listening to his voice pressuring a public official like a Mafia don to pay up is still shocking, as if all a state’s electoral votes can be handed over to the candidate who calls and yells at an election official.
It’s like hearing him confide to author Bob Woodward what a killer the coronavirus would be but telling the public it was nothing to be worried about. Honesty is never the best policy, and morality never enters his or his supporter’s minds. When Tom Cotton decided not to join the Senate putsch, it was not because it was the right thing to do. It was simply the realization that Hawley had likely stolen his thunder in Iowa in 2024.
The cynicism is as high as the Blue Ridge Mountains. Sen. Kelly Leoffler, who joined the Dirty Dozen and Trump at his runoff-eve rally, embraces Trump’s view that the Georgia election was rife with fraud—the one overseen by Republican Gov. Brian Kemp, who appointed her and who Trump wishes, along with Raffensperger, were in jail. But you can be sure she would have accepted the result of Tuesday’s runoff—if she’d won.
There are some bright spots. The Justice Department under Bill Barr said there was no fraud. Ten former defense secretaries, including sharp-elbowed partisans like Dick Cheney, said to cut it out. Despite what former National Security Adviser and felon Michael Flynn advised Trump in the Oval Office (call out the militia), the Pentagon, at least before Trump purged its top officials, said the military had no role in domestic politics.
And finally Mitch McConnell found a line he wouldn’t cross, although it was too late for him to re-herd cats he’d spent four years ordering to humor Trump. He did hold back Trump sycophants like Lindsey Graham, but the sheer number of defectors—a quarter of his caucus!—means there will be recorded votes in a ceremony dragged out for hours if not the full five days allowed by law.
That puts Sens. Roy Blunt, Ron Portman, and Lisa Murkowski, all up for re-election in 2022, on the record rejecting the president. Only Murkowski doesn’t deserve the primary coming her way. Before you feel undeserved sympathy for McConnell, know that on the COVID relief bill he added breaks for horse owners and three martini business lunches but removed two weeks of paid sick leave for workers. He waited six weeks to concede Biden was president, giving Trump time to foment a revolution.
In a final, tour de force Monday by Georgia election official Gabriel Sherman, every conspiracy theory that dances around in Trump’s head was debunked one by one. There are no gremlins eating votes or counting them three times in Dominion voting machines. Georgia’s secretary of state doesn’t have a brother named Roy who works there. No one destroyed suitcases full of ballots.
There’s time-stamped video that shows how flooding from a broken pipe in a Fulton County counting site was quickly repaired, counting resumed, with no one shredding ballots. Ballots under the table in files were where ballots were supposed to be. I could go on. Pennsylvania, another state likely to be challenged by the insurrectionists, has also been authenticated to a fare-thee-well, and it can be said with certainty that an official audit revealed that three dead mothers voted—all of them for Trump.
Boss Trump or the Constitution is not Sophie’s Choice. Trump presided over more deaths of Americans than presidents serving during wars, even now failing to save lives by mobilizing the government to get life-saving vaccinations to the millions promised it. As for the Constitution, it has given us the finest democracy the world has ever seen. To see how to be a statesman, Pence should look to Al Gore, who managed to certify an election he lost, if he did, by 536 votes in Florida and pronounced George Bush the victor with grace and humor.
That’s how we’ve done it in a democracy more fragile than it looks from the Washington Monument. Once wounded, democracies take a long time to recover, as the citizens of Venezuela, Turkey, Hungary, and the Philippines have learned.
Congress and Pence are as careless to entertain Trump’s futile yet continuing attempt to overturn the election as we were to elect him in the first place. If the president were to be put on trial for sedition, his lawyer would have a good chance of getting him off by reason of insanity. But not so 133 accomplices in Congress. And definitely not Mike Pence. If he dares to run for president, it will mean we are deservedly doomed for remembering nothing. One thing about democracies is when they start to die, they continue to.
