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The plot to set up (and tear down) Mike Pence

Writer's picture: Phillip C. Mead Phillip C. Mead

Unusual counting methods and sudden changes to voting laws made this year’s election infamous. This article is not about the election results themselves but about how we reacted to the results we were presented with. Looking for quotes from Mike Pence to add to this article brought up some interesting results, results that did not surprise me but will probably surprise many readers. The first two come from the same speech.

The truth is, you won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America.


This simple quote shows us that Mike Pence knew that a Biden Presidency was bad for our country as a whole and bad for us as individuals. He knew that Biden is anti-liberty, anti-freedom, maybe even anti-American. The next quote is more to the point.

Even Joe Biden said not long ago that well-armed police become the enemy when

Mike Pence knew that during all the anti-police riots of 2020, Biden would jump on whatever bandwagon the left pulled up next to him. He knew that Biden would sign laws that would restrict or reduce law enforcement to the point of restricting our safety. He knew crime would rise.


But this article is not about Biden’s effect on crime, it is not even about what Pence knew about Biden. It is about what we think of Pence, and how those opinions have changed. Knowing that Mike Pence didn’t agree with Biden’s policies should be no big surprise. Knowing that Mike Pence agreed with Trump’s policies should similarly be no surprise. Mike Pence is after all a Republican.


But somewhere along the line Mike Pence was set up to fail. He was set up to be the villain in a sort of conservative passion play. To paraphrase Shakespeare, the whole country was the play and we were merely players. The stage was the United States Congress and the script was the 202 Presidential election.


When we choose a vice presidential nominee it is often a failed presidential candidate. Sometimes we laugh at the fact that a vice president has few official duties other than to wait for the tragic death of a president. This is because his most important constitutional duty is that of being the president of the senate. However, that is a duty that few if any vice presidents actually assume more than once.


As the presiding, but non-voting, officer of the senate there would be little point in showing up at the senate, unless there is a tie to break, and our partisan system usually makes ties a rarity. So, the senate is left in the hands of a president pro-tempore. Except at that all important joint session of congress where the electoral votes are revealed.

While this joint session is called for in the United States Constitution, most of how it is run is contained in federal statutes and an act that was passed specifically to curtail the vice president’s powers because senators of the day did not agree with the way Thomas Jefferson presided over just such a session.


The days leading up to the joint session were when many conservatives began to switch from seeing Mike Pence as the nation’s savior to seeing him as the villain. A switch that I do not think he deserved one bit. This switch was critical to the plans of our political opposition going forward, in 2022, 2024 and beyond.


The real villains here are certain senators, a handful of governors and of course their friends in the media; but there were also the presidential advisors that gave Donald Trump some really bad legal advice. I am not sure if those advisors were villains or zealots or both, but it almost doesn’t matter. They had to get us and Mike Pence on different sides.


As soon as the initial results started being read off by the media, who seem to think they have some role in calling an election for one side or the other. Many of us started looking at the electoral votes and trying to figure out what was going to happen. Now as it looked less and less like we were winning, we began to realize that this was the end of a plan, not the beginning.


Administrative laws were perverted by unelected leftist lawyers, governors had changed election laws by executive fiat, state legislatures failed to do their constitutional duty, and now it was apparent why. More popular votes for their candidate, legal or not, would allow them to hand their state’s electoral votes to their candidate. On some levels this was less about the election of a democrat and more about preventing the election of republicans for years to come. Many state legislatures had years ago selected a method whereby the governor or the secretary of state certified the vote, not the legislature themselves. But no matter who signed the paperwork, no politician is going to go against what appears to be the popular vote. I will call this step one of the set up.


So now we get to the joint session and Mike Pence fulfilling his main constitutional duty. That of opening up 50 envelopes. Let’s see another quote from him about how this will work.

It is my considered judgement 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.


As a non-voting presiding officer, the vice president’s main function in the joint session is to rule on motions and more importantly objections. However, he can’t actually make an objection himself. He has to be handed these objections by the members of congress. This is where step two of the set up came in. While there were many members of the House of Representatives who said publicly, they were going to object, the Democrats held a majority in that house. In order for Mike Pence to even accept the objection there needed to be both a representative and a senator to make each objection. In the day leading up to the joint session, most of the Republican senators stood mute. They would not commit. No matter what Mike Pence may have wanted to do, his hands were being tied in from of us all.


A statement from his office said it this way:

The Vice President welcomes the efforts of members of the House and Senate to use the authority they have under the law to raise objections.

A post on social media confirmed this

Told @VP Team Today: ‘it ain’t over til it’s over .. and this AIN’T over!’ President @realDonaldTrump has never stopped fighting for us and we’re gonna Keep Fighting until every LEGAL vote is counted.


Finally, some senators got on board, but many of them would not sign onto all the objections. Still after the likely fraudulent runoff election results came in from Georgia giving the Democrats a majority in the Senate, the knot was complete. Because even if an objection is made, and the vice president rules that it is in order, it then goes to the two houses of congress to debate and vote on it. With a Democrat majority in one house, it is unlikely such an objection would prevail, but with a majority in both houses it is a near impossibility it would prevail against their own presidential candidate.


So now Mike Pence can only send the objections into a debate he knows the results of already. Then when he is handed the results, he can only read them and accept them as decided by congress. But the talking heads had to make sure we knew he was being bad, that he should have wielded some sort of imperial power over the congress, that he should have thrown out the electoral votes and demanded a new election. All of which would have been unconstitutional, and he knew it.


There was one other factor that came into play, and that was a few governors who were rumored to be sending two sets of votes. Since a state can only certify one set this was probably more of the bad legal advice. If by some chance a state felt they couldn’t decide or if there was some indication that a state’s votes were somehow incorrect, it would fall to congress to vote on accepting or rejecting them, not the vice president personally.

So, Mike Pence, a vice president we all supported for four years was set up to become the villain in our minds. And here is why. Mike Pence was far more dangerous to the left than Donald Trump. Because Mike Pence could walk more freely in two important political circles. Once of which Donald Trump steamrolled through but the other, he kind of uncomfortably plodded through. Pence was just as comfortable among the conservatives as he was the establishment. He is that rare elephant that can walk alongside the lions and the rhinos.

Being a quiet guy, Mike Pence was a great counter to Donald Trump’s larger than life persona. Donald Trump called opponents by nicknames; Mike Pence rarely said an unkind word about anyone. When the left tried to play up supposedly sexist remarks Trump had made, Pence wouldn’t even be in a room alone with a woman other than his wife. They were opposites who agreed on policies that would Make America Great.


If we were living in a world with Donald Trump sill in the White House, we would be talking about who Mike Pence’s running mate should be in 2024. It is extremely rare for a sitting vice president not to be their party’s nominee when the president reaches his term limit. Dick Cheney was criticized for not running at the end of George W. Bush’s second term. So the Democrats had to rid the silent majority of any love we had for Mike Pence, because he was going to be able to unite the Republicans behind a single candidate, and that would be bad for the Democrats. We already know they can’t win an honest election, but an honest election with an honest candidate, and they would be toast.


A political faction set him up to be the villain we were looking for amid our frustration about their election fraud. They needed to get rid of our A team, and force us to nominate our B team in 2024. The sad reality is that at least half of that political faction was made up of republicans. The republican leader in the Senate Mitch McConnell, openly dissuaded senators from signing onto objections. He waffled back and forth on impeachment. But this isn’t about him, it is about Mike Pence, who still had one more car up his sleeve.


Despite prevailing in the electoral college and being successful in getting most legal challenges thrown out. The Democrats in the House of Representatives still wanted scorched earth and they wanted Pence to invoke the 25th amendment to remove Donald Trump from office a few days early.


He stood strong and said no, writing this:

Last week, I did not yield to pressure to exert power beyond my constitutional authority to determine the outcome of the election, and I will not now yield to efforts in the House of Representatives to play political games at a time so serious in the life of our Nation.

Mike Pence wouldn’t give them what they wanted, which is probably what lead to the second sham impeachment. We should also not give them what they want. We should not fall into the trap of making Mike Pence out to be some sort of super villain. There are snakes in the grass, but I for one don’t think he is one of them.

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