The Conspiratorial Hub Part IV
or How Mike Pence and text messaging saved Democracy
The idiomatic expression, “take one for the team”, has become polite parlance for self-scapegoating.
It was originally a baseball term, circa 1970 or so, in which a batter would lean in, get hit by a pitch, and take first base. It was risky injury-wise and penalty-wise, i.e. if the umpire thought the batter got hit by a pitch intentionally, he could get ejected. Amazingly, “taking one for the team”, from a baseball perspective, never involved punishing the manager or coach who told the batter to do it.
The expression has morphed into designating someone to take the blame for the misdeeds or misconduct of others within an organization.
Enter Mike Pence. Everything in Part III of this series (re-read - it’s fun) was premised on the Vice-President of the United States, Michael Richard Pence, going along with a plan that would give him a lifetime of infamy or a meeting with the scaffold. The political backlash was going to hit him squarely in the face, whereas Trump, in his disingenuously narcissistic manner, would have denied any ability or power to compel Vice-President Pence to keep himself in power.
While it’s amazing that of the four co-conspirators with law licences (Gohmert, Jordan, Biggs, and Brooks), none of them seemed to balk to the point of blowing the whistle on the absurd scheme (you can also see my piece on Mo Brooks (R-AL) - another fun read). It’s a bit embarassing that none of the four seemed to have read the Eastman memos and thought, “This cannot be legal or constitutional!”)1.
The fact is that Attorney General of the U.S. William Barr, the Office of White House Counsel, Acting AG Jeffrey Rosen (he took over for Barr who tendered his resignation in late December 2020), and lawyers in the Department of Defense and the NSA, and who knows who else all told Donald Trump the plan would not work.
Actually, it would have worked. Mike Pence refuses to do what is widely acknowledges as a ministerial duty, the official count of electoral ballots is stopped, and chaos ensues.
Of course, the Senate Majority Leader could have asked the President Pro-Tem of the Senate, Sen. Charles Grasley (R-IA), to carry out the count, but it’s unlikely Trump, his minions, or Pence would have given a lawful relevance to that. So again, chaos.
Vice President Pence, for his part, continued to rebuff efforts for him to get on board with the conspiracy. It would be nice to give Pence credit for saying to Donald Trump, “This is not constitutional or legal. I practiced law long enough to know this is the kind of stupidity that gets attorneys disbarred.” Actually, according to the book, “Peril”, Pence ran the scheme by a lot of people. A whole lot.
And Vice President Pence resolved to do his duty upon speaking to the most unlikely of people.
No, not Barack Obama, the guy warmly shaking his hand, former Vice-President Dan Quayle. Dan Quayle, who left politics and Indiana to going into banking in Arizona, was one of a handful of GOP politicians who lauded Obama for his political smarts and leadership skills2.
It would be nice to think it was a pure lawyer-to-lawyer conversation, but the message was pretty clear even without the legal footnoting, “Mike, you have no flexibility on this. None. Zero. Forget it. Put it away”.
To be fair, Quayle did give Pence his legal opinion and an out for refusing to be the scapegoat for Trump and his conspiratorial insurrectionists, “I do know the position you're in. I also know what the law is. You listen to the parliamentarian. That's all you do. You have no power."3
Of course, in the midst of the attack on the Capitol, the Vice-President, the Speaker, and the Democratic caucus showed an impressive amount of political smarts — they refused to leave the Capitol building. The Secret Service even tried to get Pence to leave and he said, “I’m not getting in that (VP limo)”.
Various Democrats used text messages to tell colleagues that if they left the Capitol before counting the ballots, they would never get back, i.e. Trump could have ordered the D.C. National Guard, under the 214 year-old Insurrection Act (1807), to take control. That ancient law would have allowed Trump under the guise of quelling a rebellion (the one he incited but nevertheless) to impose some very non-Article I solutions on the nation.
A number of institutionalists, Left and Right, have advocated nixing the Insurrection Act and reforming the 1877 Electoral Vote Act — apparently Donald Trump, the conspirators, and John Eastman misguidedly relied upon both of those laws to try to overthrow the government.
Our nation’s worst mightmare was undone by a man who once defended his misspelling of potato and another who searched like Diogenes for a way to please Donald Trump. Idealists should rejoice that neither relied on pragmatism or nihilism to find some political backbone.
Mo Brooks statement of his purported advice to Donald Trump falls well short of “I want no part of something have me sitting at a disciplinary hearing in Mobile”.
https://www.depauw.edu/news-media/latest-news/details/23794/
https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/dan-quayle-talked-mike-pence-rejecting-trump-what-story-n1279406