I am in sympahy with your views of strict constitutional adherance where true meaning can be read and derived from the constituion’s articles and from the commentaries found in the Federalist Papers. Yet I think our forefathers expected us to use our brains when mischief was affoot.
What Pence could have done in the face of fraud is simply to have done nothing and to refuse perform the “ceremonial role” until the complaints and the questions have been answered to the point of possibly throwing the question to the house! He merely needed to do nothing! Upon that point, the constitution is silent as to what would be done had Pence refused to open the elctoral count envelopes and to pass them out.
I have no great love in the notion that the Constitution “is a living document” subject to “penumbras” of reinterpretation appropriate to any given era. If the constitution is said to have any elasticity at all(outside of the amendment process), it should be in the direction of strengthening our core systems of governance in the defence of liberty , not loosening them in the face of the given political and social vices of a given era which lead to a loss of our liberties and freedoms to the whims of mobs and would be tyrants!
I am especially admiring of this sentence.
"Yet I think our forefathers expected us to use our brains when mischief was affoot."