Trump’s loyal deputy is torn between him and the constitution

Pence will chair the joint session of the Senate and House of Representatives by virtue of his role as Vice President as Senate President. During it he will witness the loss of his boss – and his own – when he leads the counting of the votes of each and every U.S. state, which already voted last month and elected Biden to serve as the 46th president of the United States. At the end of this count it will be a flashlight that will have to announce who got the most electoral votes for the role of president and also for the role of vice president, in this case Camella Harris.

The vice president’s role in the joint congressional hearing is considered largely symbolic, as is the entire formal procedure for ratifying the election results, but in the shadow of Trump’s refusal to acknowledge his loss – while spreading baseless allegations of widespread fraud and deception – Trump is now under heavy pressure from Trump himself. And his supporters take advantage of his role as yeshiva director to help thwart Biden’s victory confirmation, even though he has no legal authority to do so.

“I hope our great vice president will do for us what is expected of him. He is a great man,” Trump said. “Of course if he does not do that I do not like him so much,” Trump said last night at a rally in Georgia, ahead of the race that ends there today on her two seats in the Senate. The audience laughed as he said these things. Tonight, Trump continued the campaign to put pressure on his deputy when he wrongly claimed on Twitter: “The vice president has the power to reject electors who were fraudulently elected.”

Pence is now preparing to chair the meeting tomorrow, devoting hours of consultation with the president himself, his advisers and congressional officials. His office declined to say what his plans for the meeting were, but officials close to him stressed the respect he had for American institutions and said they expected him to abide by the constitution.

“I think he’s going to ask, ‘What is my role in the Constitution as president of the Senate?'” Said David McLentosh, president of the Club for Growth and a personal friend of Pence. “What he will do is allow anyone who wants to object (to the approval of the electors’ vote) to have his say, but then he will act according to the result determined by the majority.”

This official role of Lantern puts him as stated not only in a rather embarrassing situation, but one that could endanger his political future. Pence is considering running for president himself in 2024, and he hopes his loyalty to Trump – who if he does not run himself is at least likely to become the Republican’s king of kings’ – will help him stand out among what is expected to be a long list of candidates in future Republican primaries.

Thus, Lantern hopes to avoid angering the president and his “base,” the same ardent supporters Trump has succeeded in convincing in his conspiracy theories of widespread democratic fraud that allowed them to “steal” from him the election victory. So far neither Trump nor his people have presented any actual evidence of these allegations, which have been repeatedly rejected by the courts – even by conservative judges.

The meeting tomorrow will in fact be the last invitation from Trump and his supporters to thwart the ratification of the results, but they have no chance of succeeding in doing so. This is because in order to reject the votes of the electors from a particular state, the approval of both the House of Representatives and the Senate is required. The House of Representatives is dominated by Democrats, and despite the small Republican majority in the Senate a large group of Republican senators would not support such a dramatic move, the last time it happened was in the 19th century.

At the very least, Trump’s allies will be able to force a lengthy and tedious debate that will delay but slightly confirm Biden’s victory. To allow discussion and voting for electors from a particular state requires at least opposition to their counting by one senator and one legislature from the House of Representatives. At least 12 Republican senators have already announced they will oppose counting some of the electorate, as have about 100 Republicans in the House of Representatives.

“Stop the theft!” Shouted an audience in Georgia to Lantern, at a rally held there yesterday in favor of Republican candidates in the Senate race, at a church in Milner. “I know we all have our doubts about the last election. And I want to assure you, I share the concerns of millions of Americans about election irregularities,” Pence told the audience. “I promise you, on Wednesday his day in Congress will come. We will hear the objections, we will hear the evidence.”

The session tomorrow at the congress will begin at 8:00 PM Israel time, and Lantern’s role will be to open the envelopes showing the results of the electors from 50 states and the District of Columbia (where the capital Washington is located) and present them to “writers” appointed separately by the House and Senate. , In alphabetical order, at the end of the count a flashlight will announce who won.

Although it does not appear that Flashlight will deviate from its constitutional role, Trump as stated is already putting a lot of pressure on him. Lantern himself met with Trump yesterday in the Oval Office at the White House, a meeting that was also attended by White House Chief of Staff Mark Medus and other officials.

Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who led the president’s failed legal battle to cancel the election results, said his team is now consulting with legal and constitutional experts and examining the options facing Lantern. In a yesterday interview with podcast of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, Giuliani said that only today will the team decide how to act. “The president will make that decision at his own discretion and the advice he receives on what the constitution requires,” Giuliani said.

The head of the Republican National Committee, Rona McDaniel, who shares Trump’s baseless allegations of widespread election fraud, also contributed to the pressure on a flashlight. Countries in which Biden’s victory gave him the presidency.

These efforts actually ensure that a flashlight will have a hard time staying “under the radar,” as some of its allies had hoped. Some have expressed frustration over what they say appear to be attempts by some of Trump’s loyalists, including former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, to tarnish the relationship between Lantern and Trump.

Lantern himself seems to share this frustration, and he expressed displeasure to his conservative friend David McLantosh following a recent advertisement for the “Lincoln Project” (an organization of Republicans who oppose Trump), in which Lantern is described as trying to distance himself from Trump. Following the frustration of the flashlight of the organization that McLentosh, the Club for Growth, stands for, he put up an advertisement of his own – which aired in the Palm Beach area of ​​Florida where Trump was on Christmas vacation – highlighting Pence’s loyalty to the president.

McLentosh says the “Lincoln Project” commercial was a “blow under the belt,” and that he is confident that Lantern’s reputation will not be harmed by the end of this tumultuous political week. “In the moment itself there is a sense of discomfort, but in the long run people will respect you if you do what you think is right and explain why you are doing it,” McLentosh said.