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Trump and Pence spar over idea the VP could have overturned election. Neither men are backing down.

February 5, 2022 | | Print Article

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Still convinced that he won the 2020 election, former President Donald Trump is again lashing out at his second-in-command, former Vice President Mike Pence, this time for having been President Joe Biden’s “automatic conveyor belt” to the White House.

“Just saw Mike Pence’s statement on the fact that he had no right to do anything with respect to the Electoral Vote Count, other than being an automatic conveyor belt for the Old Crow Mitch McConnell to get Biden elected President as quickly as possible. Well, the Vice President’s position is not an automatic conveyor if obvious signs of voter fraud or irregularities exist,” he said in a statement released late Friday.

To be clear, all the relevant authorities have concluded that weren’t enough irregularities and fraud to have affected the outcome of the election.

“That’s why the Democrats and RINOs are working feverishly together to change the very law that Mike Pence and his unwitting advisors used on January 6 to say he had no choice. The reason they want it changed is because they now say they don’t want the Vice President to have the right to ensure an honest vote,” the statement continues.

“In other words, I was right and everyone knows it. If there is fraud or large scale irregularities, it would have been appropriate to send those votes back to the legislatures to figure it out. The Dems and RINOs want to take that right away. A great opportunity lost, but not forever, in the meantime our Country is going to hell!” the statement concludes.

The statement was written in response to remarks that Pence made during the Federalist Society’s annual conference on Friday.

“I heard this week that President Trump said I had the right to overturn the election, but 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.

“And frankly, there is no idea more un-American than the notion than any one person could choose the American president. Under the Constitution, I had no right to change the outcome of our election. And Kamala Harris will have no right to overturn the election when we beat them in 2024,” the former VP added.

The remarks were a response to the former president’s previous attack.

In a statement released on Tuesday, Trump claimed that Pence had had “the right” to effectively overturn the 2020 presidential election by “sen[ding] the votes back to various legislators for reassessment after so much fraud and irregularities.”

Because Pence failed to exploit this alleged right, he should be investigated, the former president argued: “[T]he Unselect Committee should be investigating why … Mike Pence did not send back the votes for recertification or approval, in that it has now been shown that he clearly had the right to do so!”

Dovetailing back to Trump’s latest statement, it references a bipartisan attempt to reform the Electoral Count Act, the law whose current loopholes he’d hoped to exploit to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

“The act dictates that the president of the Senate (the U.S. vice president) reads out the votes from each state, which Congress then counts before certifying the winner. While the vice president’s role seems largely ceremonial, with no ability to alter an election’s outcome, the act does not say so explicitly,” according to Reason magazine.

“Former President Donald Trump and his acolytes seized upon this vagueness when they tried to pressure then–Vice President Mike Pence to either decline to certify the results, or else simply pick a different slate of electors in enough swing states to tip the election to Trump,” the libertarian magazine notes.

A large number of Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, are open to reforming the law, but Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer — who purports to be so worried about Trump trying to pull off something similar in 2024 — has called the proposal “unacceptably insufficient and even offensive.”

This rhetoric has led to accusations that neither he nor the Democrat Party at large are genuinely concerned about stopping the overturning of future elections — and that all their grievances are just political tongue-wagging.

Vivek Saxena
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