Judging Freedom - Mike Pence vs. Trump

Episode Date: February 7, 2022

Former VP Pence defended himself against Donald Trump’s charge that Pence could have overruled state electoral vote tallies on 1/6/21 at the Capitol. Pence presided over the vote counting as the President of the Senate, but he refused Trump’s pressure to disqualify electors from some closely contested states. #Trump #election #Voting #PenceSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Save $80 with code SPACE80 at Talkspace.com. Hello there everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here with Judging Freedom. Today is Monday, February 7, 2022. It's about 1.35 in the afternoon here on the East Coast. One of the controversies that's bubbling up today has to do with various interpretations of the Constitution. You may recall that President Trump, former President Donald Trump, recently said of his Vice President, Mike Pence, he had the ability to prevent the election of Joe Biden by rejecting electoral votes from the states in which Trump and his allies had challenged the electors. And he could have done this unilaterally. And late last week, was Friday night, Vice President Pence speaking to a group of lawyers, the Federalist Society,

at a conference in Orlando, Florida, said President Trump is wrong. The Vice President does not have that authority. So who's right? Well, President Trump is wrong and Vice President Pence is correct under the Constitution. As much as Trump honestly believed that he was re-elected and that the election was stolen from him. His remedy was in the courts. He and his allies filed 61 litigations and they lost 60. And the one in which they prevailed did not have to do with the number of votes. It had to do with how close the people who were monitoring the vote counting could stand to the vote counters in the era of COVID. And the court reduced that distance from 12 feet to six feet.

But all the other litigations, all that evidence that Trump's allies said they had about why he really won certain states and that false electors were being sent to Washington, D.C., although you don't actually go to D.C. anymore. The Secretary of State of your home state certifies who won and certifies who gets that state's electoral votes. President Trump was of the view that Vice President Pence, as presiding over a joint session of Congress, could on his own have rejected electoral votes from states where Trump had challenged and had lost the challenge. Not so. The Vice President's role is just ministerial to count the votes. I mean, if that were the case, Al Gore could have rejected the electoral votes from Florida and decided that he had been

elected president in 2000 and not George W. Bush. That's just not the way it works. We don't have a system in which one person can negate the will of the electorate. But we do have rules that govern elections that decide who can vote and when you can vote and where you can vote and how the voting will be tabulated. And when the loser feels that the rules were not followed, he has the opportunity to challenge them. Man, losing 60 out of 61 challenges is pretty telling. The Trump lawyers, and some of them were fine lawyers throughout the country, could provide no credible evidence that Joe Biden actually lost a state and Donald Trump won it, but the electoral votes went to Biden anyway. These were political arguments being made by then-President Trump, not legal or constitutional ones. Pence's argument was a legal and constitutional argument.

The vice president's role is ministerial. It's to make sure that the votes are counted and added properly, the electoral votes in front of a joint session of Congress. It's not to evaluate the votes whatsoever. That's the job of the Secretary of State of each state, tempered by any interference by the judiciary, should there be a basis for it, of which this last time around, there was none. Judge Napolitano, judging freedom.