Ask Mike Flynn about Deep State Pence.
Posted on 02/11/2022 8:36:34 PM PST by jfd1776
Vice President Pence has spoken out on January 6, 2021. He announced that President Trump said that Pence had the power to overturn the election that day, and that he should have done so… But he didn’t do it.
Vice President Pence is winning considerable points with the mass media and the RINOs for saying that President Trump was wrong; Pence, in fact, did not have the power to overturn the election.
In truth, this is a typical example of the Left, and of the Left’s enablers, capitalizing on an example when President Trump was correct in fact, but used the wrong words. President Trump is often clumsy with his wording.
Of course, Vice President Pence did not have the power to overturn an election. In a republic, no one does. Overturning an election is a coup d’état; we would all hope that America will never have need of such measures.
But, however clumsy his wording, that is not what President Trump had expected Pence to do. President Trump rightly expected Pence to use every legal power of his office to ensure that the true will of the people was reflected in the next inauguration. Period.
President Trump is not alone in his confidence that Joe Biden, a dementia patient who hid in his basement the entire campaign, could not possibly have been legitimately elected by the majority of citizens in the United States of America in 2020.
That is not to say that the election couldn’t have been stolen. Almost any election can be stolen, especially if you remove all of the safeguards that normally ensure an honest vote and an honest count.
Consider: What has happened, in recent years?
- Motor Voter laws automatically register people on the voting rolls, enabling them to vote, regardless of citizenship status or felony status, the two most common disqualifiers for a legitimate count in most states (and remember, we have many tens of millions of non-citizens who drive).
- More and more cities, counties, and states either refuse to allow voter roll clean-up to remove the dead, the moved-away, and the fictional from the lists, or, worse, allow same-day registration that does an end run around the very concept of such voting rolls.
- Numerous states took advantage of the COVID-19 "pandemic" to scare people out of voting in person at polling places, and to authorize mass-mailings of ballots to anyone on any list, in many cases, multiple times. Some states even allowed people to use their home printer and make up their own ballots.
- None of these expansions of ballot access were matched with any kind of commensurate controls. For example, the absentee ballot process traditionally required a formal request by the voter, along with photocopies of identification or similar verification methods to ensure that the mail-in ballot was cast by the correct person, in the absence of a human interaction in a polling place. These measures were not used with mail-in ballots; the 2020 mail in election was almost completely uncontrolled and unguarded.
As a result, at least 20 million more ballots were alleged to have been cast in 2022 then statistics would expect… quite possibly, many more than that.
This is just a short listing of a few of the reasons to cast doubt on the 2020 election. There are dozens more types of vote fraud that certainly occurred, the only question is, in what numbers. Were these dozens of methods of fraud sufficient to change the results?
Individually... some were. But taken together... of course they were.
The presidency is chosen in a different manner than any other elected position in America. And this system has changed slightly - only slightly - a few times since the Constitution was written.
We have added the concept of political parties, and made them a part of the process. We abandoned the original idea of the top two vote-getters being elected president and vice president; and decided to have presidents and vice presidents run together as a ticket. We have slightly changed the way that the electors meet, and we have changed the date when the new president is sworn in.
But one thing we have never changed is the fact that the vice president oversees the final delivery of the states’ electors, their acceptance, and their count.
Why? And why does that matter?
Our Constitution is a narrow, tightly focused document. There is nothing extraneous in it. It identifies who has the power to levy taxes, the power to command the military, the power to judge court cases and to appoint diplomats.
It is therefore safe to assume that when one officer or branch has a role to play, that role is an active one, not merely a formality.
The vice president only has a couple of duties besides being ready to step in if a president dies or is impeached. These are not formalities. One of his key duties, for example, is to oversee the senate. Why? Because the Framers expected the vice president to frequently be a tie-breaking vote. The advent of political parties has changed this, so there are far fewer tie-breakers needed than the framers expected, but the power remains, and it is still frequently used.
By the same token, if the vice president was given the duty of supervising the collection of the states 'electors, it can only mean that this is also not a formality, but rather, that he has the power to question those slates, when questions are valid.
Remember, by the time we reached January 6, 2021, it was clear to any observer that there was a huge cloud over the electoral choice of at least seven states. Numerous court cases had arisen, many of which had not been heard, being frequently denied on technicalities or rebuffed by partisan or nervous judges. Multiple state legislatures' committees - including Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Georgia - had already begun holding hearings, identifying huge irregularities, broad enough to cast doubt on the voting results in their respective states.
But there was no structural opportunity for these state legislatures to declare their will throughout that period.
We have been holding elections for 230 years. This was the first time that there were so many allegations of fraud, so much cleare discrepancy between the laws passed by the state legislatures and the administrations of elections by their respective state bureaucracies.
The Left and its lapdogs want the American public to believe that the choice of electors is in the hands of the city and county election boards, the county clerks, and the state and county secretaries of state.
This is completely untrue.
In fact, one element of the Constitution that has never been amended, and therefore stands to this day without alteration, is Article II, Section 1, Clause 2, which declares unequivocally that the selection of electors is to occur in a manner set forth by the state legislatures. Nobody else. Just the state legislatures.
Governors, precinct workers, poll watchers, political parties, news reporters, pop-culture personalities, party hacks and bureaucrats have no role other than what those state legislatures may choose to give them.
And it was clear by January 6 that, in at least several states, the state legislatures should have been given the opportunity to weigh in, and determine for themselves which slates should represent their states.
This was the opportunity for the vice president to act. This should have been Vice President Pence‘s moment.
Not to overturn an election, not to stage a coup... but to prevent an election from being stolen, to prevent a coup from occurring.
All he had to do was to declare what everyone knew: that there was a cloud over certain states' elector slates, and turn the question back to the state legislatures of those states, asking them to either approve or replace the slate of electors that their bureaucrats had sent up for the count.
The Constitution has a provision for what to do if there aren’t enough electors to provide a majority. We might have needed that provision... or, if the states in question acted quickly, we would not have…
But the 2020 election will forever have a cloud on it, not only because of all the vote fraud, but also because a vice president failed to fulfill his constitutional obligation to serve as the one and only final brake on a process that had gone tragically awry.
Normally, in a constitutional republic, it speaks well of a politician when he resists the temptation to exceed his authority. It is therefore tempting to give Vice President Pence the benefit of the doubt in this regard.
But he cannot be let off so easily.
We need to look at the election of 2020 like a medieval war between city-states, in which an enemy has crossed a sea to fight, and has passed over the outer mountain ranges or across the rivers that nature had provided the city-state as protection... and the enemy has finally approach the city limits, where the city had a fortress wall surrounded by a deep moat.
Vice President Pence was that last line of defense. He was to govern the wall around the city…
And instead of holding firm to protect his city against the invaders… Vice President Pence threw down his sword, opened the gates, and welcomed them in.
Why? Apparently because, after all this, the beautiful stone walls and rod iron portcullises of this fine city were just too pretty to see them damaged by arrows and battering rams. Appearances, in the end, were more important to him than the risk of a corrupt enemy taking control of our government.
Copyright 2022 John F Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based trade compliance trainer and transportation manager, writer and actor. A one-time county chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party, he has been writing regularly for Illinois Review since 2009.
A collection of John’s Illinois Review articles about vote fraud, The Tales of Little Pavel, and his 2021 political satires about current events, Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes One and Two, are available, in either paperback or eBook, only on Amazon.
There are plenty of never Trumper’s here at Free Republic who are glad Pence did what he did. They claim he had a constitutional obligation. They are wrong.
He had a constitutional requirement to reject and therefore turn back to the states where the vote results had obviously been altered.
Right, every time pence’s name is mentioned it must be cowardly Mike pence, who certified a stolen election.
There were legal challenges still pending, and as a result Pence had no business certifying electoral college results.
Which we knew then and we know now were fraudulent.
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Strip away the Electors - strip away that move totally - he wouldn’t take his President’s calls, he ignored the WH legal team, he didn’t ask for action on the part of the DoJ to investigate the Dominion machines, and he did.not attend a Trump celebration, but did attend Biden Galas, and he ran out and sold a book by hawking his position of going against Trump, securing several Million and paid Cash for a new Mansion. Got a no-show job supporting the Deep State, and said the Bible authorized him to effectively promote and boost the Biden Foreign Cash Machine and the Pelosi Gravy train in DC.
God just wanted him in a Mansion high fiving Dementia Joe and craven Nancy Pelosi.
Not to overturn an election, not to stage a coup... but to prevent an election from being stolen, to prevent a coup from occurring.All he had to do was to declare what everyone knew: that there was a cloud over certain states' elector slates, and turn the question back to the state legislatures of those states, asking them to either approve or replace the slate of electors that their bureaucrats had sent up for the count.
Yup.
Pence is slime and that was recognized by many long before that January 6 debacle.
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Strange how Pence is linked to MCarthy’s pal, and Hunter Biden is also linked to Luntz.
Seems Luntz, who is gay, is directly connected to McCarthy, Lindsey Graham, Mike Pence, and Hunter Biden.
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Well, the deranged like to have a scapegoat.
Trump tee’d up his loss during debate 1, then knocked it out of the park in debate 2.
Anyone who confuses (or uses as an excuse) what was accomplished while he was in office with his completely abysmal ability to connect and not come across as an asshole is an idiot that prefers red meat quotes over electoral results.
Trump couldn’t connect with the people? That is your argument?
LOL
The only reason Trump picked this loser was the Access Hollywood tape. Were there no other Republicans with strong Christian credentials who believed in his MAGA agenda ?
I think the states like PA my state failed to give the ammunition. i.e. a second slate or a vote of some kind to decertify the Secretary of states certification of the electors based on the fraudulent results. About 29K more mail in votes counted than mail in voters in the SURE system just in delaware county alone, 400K statewide as Frank Ryan’s audit shows. But no state legislature set forth any alternate slate of electors or decertification for Pence to use. My disappointment with Pence is that he is using the commie speak when he says he couldn’t overthrow the election. His job was to be the final arbiter of what was actually going on at the state level. I think he had the same issues with his covid team.
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Can you imagine Tim Kaine not taking Hillary’s calls, and ignoring her strategy?
Can you imagine Kamala Harris deciding to not place the tie breaking Vote for Joe in the Senate, but voting with Republicans against Biden’s bill, defeating it?
Can you imagne Al Gore siding with Ken Starr and saying Clinton had a troubling pattern of behavior?
He attended Biden’s gala events!
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But that's the point. He had the authority and the duty to ASK for an alternate slate of electors. In effect, Pence's inaction deprived those state legislatures of the authority to act.
There were a lot of screw ups in 2020. The truth is the left had been preparing the steal for four years and we had no real plan to counter it.
Rather than looking back, I would like to see more articles preparing for 2024. What is the strategy? If the GOP has the House and Senate is there a plan to prevent that election from being certified if it is stolen?
Pence treated the January 6 joint session of Congress as an event, not a process. As an event, he would just show up; as a process, he would assert his position throughout.
Throughout American history, scholars would always talk about how the Constitutional separation of powers was a tug of war between the branches: we sometimes had a strong President and a weak Congress, and sometimes we had a strong Congress and a weak President. It came down to the personality of the people in office and the needs of the country at the time. The branches were always accusing the others as engaging in "power grabs," and would often try to preempt a branch from acting strongly by prematurely leveling this charge.
I think most people would agree that Pence exhibits a weak personality compared to the other senior office holders in government, and would shy away from being seen as a "power grabber."
Setting that aside, let's look at the so-called "ceremonial roles" in the Constitution. The author is correct that we should not expect high office officials to neuter themselves in ceremonial roles. The Framers of the Constitution would not have done that to the people who achieved the highest offices in the nation. If these roles devolved into ceremonial care-taker positions, it's because the people who held them at pivotal times were weak and not assertive people, or they chose to subordinate themselves to another branch of government.
The most ceremonial role in the Constitution is that of the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court who presides over the impeachment trial in the Senate. A strong Senate has, over time, cowered the Chief Justice into being a clerk of the court, reducing the meaning of what it is to preside over a court. A strong Chief Justice could easily assert traditional court roles and make the Senate act for or against the Chief Justice (see how Tom Harkin (D-IA) bullied Chief Justice William Rehnquist during the Bill Clinton trial, playing on Rehnquist's reputation for being easygoing and non-confrontational).
As an event, the Chief Justice could just show up and keep time. As a process, the Chief Justice could participate in advance of the trial, laying down his expectations on how the trial would proceed, and telling Senators what to expect from him as the presiding officer. Look at how Chief Justice John Roberts told the Senate that he would not preside over the second trial of Donald Trump.
Vice President Pence should have treated the role of presiding over the counting of the Electoral College ballots as a process, too. Instead of just showing up on January 6 and gaveling in a joint session of Congress, he should have asserted his role all along, reminding Congress of what he will do when January 6 arrives if certain things do not happen between Election Day, the day of the Electoral College vote, and the day of counting the votes in Congress.
As the steward of the entire process, Pence should have spoken out immediately after Election Day, calling out the irregularities and telling the state legislatures that they should be asserting their Title 3 Chapter 1 powers immediately, because the clock was ticking.
Pence just showed up on the January 6 event to perform a ceremonial role of opening envelopes and reading votes, because he is not an assertive person and he chose not to be engaged in the process from beginning to end.
-PJ
Trump is clumsy with words, and that’s a liability when the opposition makes every misplaced expression into an impeachable offense. The cancel assholes also helps them with that. But at least Trump can talk on his own, memorize his speeches and think on his feet. He does his homework and did the people’s business. As for the debates, Basement Joe Ribbentrop Biden didn’t look so great either.
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