Mike Pence, Who Tried His Best to Help Trump Overturn the Election, Wants to Be President in 2024

Over the last month, it’s become clear that while Mike Pence was basically hailed as a hero on January 6 for refusing to overturn the results of the 2020 election, a more apt description would be “guy who did the absolute bare minimum and in fact tried his hardest to figure out a way to stop Joe Biden from being president in service to Donald Trump.” As we learned from Bob Woodward and Robert Costa’s book, Peril, Pence, in his own words, reportedly told Trump that he did “everything” he could to try and stop the certification of a free and fair election, having pleaded with former vice president Dan Quayle to help him figure out if there was any way to pull it off, and telling Quayle, “You don’t know the position I’m in.” 

Meanwhile, as the The New York Times reported last week, Pence and his legal counsel, Greg Jacob, took the time to meet with John Eastman—the lawyer who wrote a memo laying out a plan for Trump to overturn the election—and despite seeming skeptical of his powers, Pence appeared to seriously explore the idea of halting the certification of Biden’s win. As Eastman told the Times, “I think Jacob was looking for a way for he and Pence to be convinced to take the action that we were requesting, and so I think he continued to meet with me and push back on the arguments and hear my counters, what have you, to try and see whether they could reconcile themselves to what the president had asked.” In other words, as The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent put it, despite ultimately deciding he didn’t have the power to overturn the results of the election, Pence seemingly wanted “to be convinced otherwise.” 

Anyway, we bring all of this up because it’s important to remember that Pence isn’t a great defender of the Constitution not only for posterity’s sake, but because the former V.P. is apparently intent on riding that schtick all the way to the White House in 2024. Per the Post:

Nine months after the Jan. 6 insurrection and his subsequent departure from the White House, Pence’s friends and advisers say he is likely to run for president—especially if Trump does not. He is taking all the traditional steps to position himself for a 2024 presidential bid—hopscotching the country giving six-figure speeches, sitting down for interviews with friendly conservative media outlets and hosting fundraisers for Republican candidates and causes.

Pence, 62, is being helped by a stable of fans—including many from his years as a stalwart evangelical figure—who say he can offer a path forward for the Republican Party rooted in the cultural and fiscal conservatism of its past, according to numerous allies and advisers, most of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. His potential candidacy serves as a stark test of whether there can be a political life after Trump for a Republican like Pence—who served four years as Trump’s loyal and subservient No. 2, only to be targeted by a pro-Trump mob and reviled as a traitor by Trump and millions of his followers for refusing to attempt to overturn the 2020 election

Pence has in recent months played down the events of Jan. 6 and—as he did Monday in an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity—casts coverage of the aftermath as an attempt to “demean” Trump voters. It is part of a consistent balancing act for Pence—taking credit for what he sees as the good of the Trump administration while eliding the bad.

Setting aside the fact that Pence himself apparently worked very hard to figure out a way to give Trump what he wanted on January 6, most sane people would agree that whitewashing the events of a day that left five people dead and democracy on life support should disqualify a person from being president (or part of polite society). But as it turns out, it’s not actually those who are horrified about what transpired at the Capitol that Pence needs to worry about when it comes to 2024 support—it’s those who think the insurrection was justified and that he got in the way.

For a contingent of hardcore Trump supporters, Pence is a turncoat—the coward who betrayed the former president when he refused to toss out the results of a free and fair election. Lonna Black, 60, a stay-at-home mother from Gilbert, Ariz., who attended a rally in support of the Jan. 6 rioters in Phoenix last month, said she was not a Pence fan after he certified the election results in favor of Joe Biden. “I think he only has like 1 percent support in the Republican Party, if I know right,” Black said, referring to surveys giving him low marks. “Most people look at him as a traitor.” And from Bibi Harringston, 50, who works in design and sales in Glendale, when asked whether she would support Pence if he runs for president: “Oh gosh, please, no. We know that Trump carried him.”

Pence, she suggested, “can fade away with Biden.”

Tim Miller, a former Republican strategist and ardent Trump critic who works as a writer for the Bulwark website, said he recently observed two focus groups of solid Trump supporters in Georgia and Ohio for the Bulwark’s new podcast, The Focus Group. When Pence’s name came up, he said, the reaction was decidedly muted. “He’ll get one or two thumbs up, a lot of thumbs down, a lot of mehs,” Miller said. “I just don’t see where he builds to.”

Ask Pence aides and allies—who will be riding the “Pence saved democracy” story for all eternity—though, and the former V.P. will have loads of support, particularly if he focuses on the policy initiatives that got done under the Trump administration. You know, like family separation and travel bans. But even they say he has no shot in hell if you-know-who decides to make another run for the White House.

Many Pence allies say it will be impossible for him to run if Trump is also in the field, though some of his political advisers maintain he could still enter, though with a more difficult path ahead.

Several longtime Pence allies say the former vice president is more ambitious and ruthless than many realize. Before he makes any final decision, one adviser said, Pence and his wife, Karen, will probably take time away and pray on the decision, asking whether God is calling on them to serve again. One challenge for Pence, however, will be avoiding the wrath and derision of Trump, who is likely to get jealous if his former No. 2 rises in the polls, allies of both men say. Sam Nunberg, a former Trump 2016 aide, said Trump is unlikely to tolerate anything short of total adulation from any Republican in the field.

“Should Donald Trump not run in 2024, the first candidate in the Republican primary to criticize him in any shape or form, he will squash like a bug,” Nunberg told the Post. “If Mike Pence were to publicly criticize Trump for January 6, then I think Trump would look to sink him.”

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Federal judge delivers blistering rebuke to Texas abortion law, Supreme Court conservatives

Like millions of Americans, U.S. District Court Judge Robert Pitman was thoroughly disgusted with Texas’s barbaric, no-exceptions abortion law. And in his case, he was actually able to do something about it. Per CNN:

A federal judge in Texas issued an order Wednesday blocking the state’s six-week abortion ban. “From the moment S.B. 8 went into effect, women have been unlawfully prevented from exercising control over their lives in ways that are protected by the Constitution,” U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman said in the decision, granting a request from the Justice Department, which brought the lawsuit. “That other courts may find a way to avoid this conclusion is theirs to decide; this Court will not sanction one more day of this offensive deprivation of such an important right.”

Pitman, in his order, aimed to get around the novel enforcement scheme—which, its supporters have boasted, was put in place to complicate the legal path abortion rights advocates usually take to obtain court orders blocking extreme laws. Rather than task government officials with enforcing the ban, the Texas Legislature deputized private citizens to bring state court litigation against any clinic that performs an abortion. Those who assist a person obtain an abortion that violates the ban can be targeted with state court litigation as well, under the law, which threatens damages of at least $10,000.

“Fully aware that depriving its citizens of this right by direct state action would be flagrantly unconstitutional, the State contrived an unprecedented and transparent statutory scheme to do just that,” the judge wrote Wednesday.

Pitman’s order blocks any officers of the state from enforcing the ban and explicitly prohibits said officers from “accepting or docketing, maintaining, hearing, resolving, awarding damages in, enforcing judgments in, enforcing any administrative penalties in, and administering any lawsuit” brought under the state law. CNN notes that “The judge also ordered the state to take proactive steps to inform court officials, as well as private individuals seeking to enforce the ban, that the law is currently blocked under his order.” In a statement, Attorney General Merrick Garland celebrate the decision, saying, “today’s ruling enjoining the Texas law is a victory for women in Texas and for the rule of law.”

Unfortunately, thanks to the uniquely fucked-up nature of the law, abortion providers might not yet feel comfortable performing the procedure just yet. Per Bloomberg:

Crucially, S.B. 8 strips abortion providers of protection for procedures they perform when the law is blocked by a court order that is later overturned. That would seem to blunt the effectiveness of the temporary injunction U.S. District Judge Robert Pitman issued Wednesday night in Austin, in a suit brought by the U.S. Justice Department.

“Each provider will need to make their own determination of whether to provide in the face of the threat that they could be sued for serving their patients retroactively,” Brigitte Amiri, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Reproductive Freedom Project, told Bloomberg. She added that the retroactive provision is another “cruel tactic” designed to “harass and intimidate pregnant Texans and their providers.… But as the district court recognized, the retroactivity provision is on shaky legal ground and some providers have explicitly said that they will provide under an injunction.”

About an hour after Pitman issued his ruling, Texas attorney general Ken Paxton—late of arguing that forcing pregnant people to travel out of state for abortions has been great for commerce—filed a notice to appeal the order to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is viewed as one of the most conservative in the country. Hence, reactions like these:

Florida is still doing its thing

Its thing being punishing schools for requiring kids to wear masks in the midst of a pandemic with no end in sight thanks to [checks notes] states like Florida. Per CNN:

The Florida Board of Education on Thursday voted to sanction eight school districts that have instituted COVID-19 mask mandates without giving parents the ability to opt their students out. In doing so, the state board said that school districts in Alachua, Brevard, Broward, Duval, Leon, Miami-Dade, Orange, and Palm Beach counties were not in compliance and directly violating a Florida Department of Health emergency rule. As a penalty, Florida Board of Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran has requested that funds for each district be withheld “in an amount equal to 1/12 of all school board members’ salaries,” in addition to withholding any amount equal to federal grant funds awarded to those districts by President Joe Biden’s administration.

In a statement, Alachua County superintendent Carlee Simon said her district will “maintain its current masking protocols” despite the sanction, adding, “We believe those protocols comply with state law and our constitutional obligation to provide students with a safe learning environment.” Brevard County superintendent Mark Mullins argued mask mandates are necessary by pointing out that after schools closed without them, “We had over 3,200 positive cases, had to shut down one school and were on the brink of having shut down others.” Mullins added that staff members were also hospitalized. All of which one might think would lead Florida to reconsider its insane policy re: masks, but apparently not so much!

Nothing to see here, just a sitting member of Congress maintaining the jury’s still out on the results of the 2020 election

Elsewhere!