On Friday, Mike Pence delivered a speech before a local chapter of the Federalist Society in Florida, during which he told the audience that President Trump is “wrong” for criticizing him for not stopping the certification of the 2020 election despite the irregularities.
“Our Founders were deeply suspicious of consolidated power in the nation’s capital and were rightly concerned with foreign interference if presidential elections were decided in the capital,” Pence said. “But there are those in our party who believe that as the presiding officer over the joint session of Congress, I possessed unilateral authority to reject electoral college votes. And I heard this week, President Trump said I had the right to ‘overturn the election’. President Trump is wrong… I had no right to overturn the election.”
“Under the Constitution, I had no right to change the outcome of our election, and (Vice President) Kamala Harris will have no right to overturn the election when we beat them in 2024,” Pence added.
Mike Pence today: “I heard this week that Pres Trump said I had the right to overturn the election. Pres Trump is wrong .. There is no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person can choose the American president.” pic.twitter.com/Pt8H4Um0MC
— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) February 4, 2022
Let’s get this out of the way: Pence is correct.
Related: Pence: “I Had No Right to Overturn the Election.”
The example I like to use is the 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore. The latter was the sitting vice president at the time, and the entire election hinged on a few hundred votes in just one state. So what if, on Jan. 6, 2001, Congress convened to certify the Electoral College ballots submitted by the states, and then-Vice President Al Gore, despite conceding a few days prior, listened to the voices in his party that claimed that election was stolen, and convinced Gore that he had the authority to reject the electoral college votes of Florida?
Would anyone who believes Pence had the authority on Jan. 6, 2021, to reject Electoral College votes from Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Georgia, Michigan, and Nevada because of the irregularities in those states also agree that then-Vice President Al Gore had the unilateral authority to reject Florida’s Electoral College votes from the 2000 election?
Don’t even try to tell me they would.
I believe that fraud and irregularities changed the outcome of the 2020 presidential election—why else did the left try to censor talk about it? But it was the states that had to do something about it. And by the time it was on Pence to certify the results, there was nothing he could do. The vice president’s role is ceremonial.
I feel as cheated by the results of the 2020 election as any other Trump supporter. It burns me the way anyone who questions the results is likened to an insurrectionist, even though Democrats questioned the results of every presidential election they lost in the past twenty years. But being angry at Mike Pence is a waste of energy, and Donald Trump is wrong to continue insisting that Pence had any power to stop the election from being certified.
It’s time for Trump supporters to put their anger at Pence in the past. If we want to get back at the Democrats for 2020, we can’t be fighting amongst ourselves. Joe Biden managed to mess America up royally in less than a year, and we’ll only be able to right the ship in 2024 if we’re united as a party.