Former vice president Mike Pence on Friday strongly rejected former president Donald Trump’s renewed claims that he could have personally overturned the results of the 2020 election.
“I heard this week that President Trump said I had the right to overturn the election. President Trump is wrong. I had no right to overturn the election. The presidency belongs to the American people, and the American people alone,” he said at a Federalist Society event in Florida.
“Frankly there is almost no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president,” he added.
Despite pressure from Trump and the MAGA camp, Pence has repeatedly resisted claims that he had the power to invalidate the Electoral College votes on January 6, 2021. His Friday statement represents his boldest condemnation of such rhetoric yet.
Pence had called his responsibility to count the presidential election ballots “largely ceremonial.”
“It is my considered judgment that my oath to support and defend the Constitution constrains me from claiming unilateral authority to determine which electoral votes should be counted and which should not,” Pence said in a letter to Congress then.
The recent inflammatory statement accused the former vice president of dodging a supposed obligation to correct the election outcome amid what Trump claimed was overwhelming and widespread evidence of voter fraud.
“If the Vice President (Mike Pence) had ‘absolutely no right’ to change the Presidential Election results in the Senate, despite fraud and many other irregularities, how come the Democrats and RINO Republicans, like Wacky Susan Collins, are desperately trying to pass legislation that will not allow the Vice President to change the results of the election?,” Trump wrote in a statement. “Actually, what they are saying, is that Mike Pence did have the right to change the outcome, and they now want to take that right away. Unfortunately, he didn’t exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election!”
Trump had originally appealed in January 2021 to the Electoral Count Act. While it authorizes Congress to settle disputes between competing slates of Electoral College votes, it did not give Pence the authority to discredit electoral votes despite Trump’s assurances. Lawmakers are now trying to reform the law to make it explicit that the vice president’s power in certifying election results is limited to simply opening the envelopes, which Trump has interpreted as a tacit admission that Pence previously had the power to declare the election for his running mate but did not use it.
At the time, Trump’s legal team had hoped for Pence to either invalidate the electoral votes or delay the counting of electoral votes to send the voter fraud issue to the state legislatures to investigate, with the latter being the overall favored option.
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