Mike Pence will not interfere in Joe Biden victory certification

Mike Pence is MIA from the Coronavirus Task Force.

Vice President Mike Pence will not interfere with certifying electoral college votes for President-elect Joe Biden, he announced in a letter Wednesday just as Congress was preparing to meet.

President Donald Trump, still convinced that baseless accusations of voter fraud and irregularities, had pressured Pence to intervene to assure him a win despite Biden’s 306 to 232 victory and dozens of failed court challenges seeking to overturn or decertify results.

“Given the controversy surrounding this year’s election, some approach this year’s quadrennial tradition with great expectation, and others with dismissive disdain. Some believe that as Vice President, I should be able to accept or reject electoral votes unilaterally. Others believe that electoral votes should never be challenged in a Joint Session of Congress,” Pence wrote.

“After careful study of our Constitution, our laws, and our history, I believe neither view is correct.”

Pence wrote that he would preside over Wednesdays hearings, in which some 150 Republican members of the House and more than a dozen members of the Senate are expected to challenge the results in various states Biden won, with careful consideration and ensure a fair conversation. But he rejected the notion that he alone had the power to affect an outcome counter to the electoral college results.

“Vesting the Vice President with unilateral authority to decide presidential contests would be entirely antithetical to that design,” Pence continued.

Despite his largely ceremonial assignment, Pence was under intense pressure from the President and legions of supporters who want Pence to use the moment to overturn the will of the voters in a handful of battleground states.

“If Mike Pence does the right thing we win the election,” Trump told thousands of supporters who rallied Wednesday on the Ellipse, just south of the White House, an hour before the count in Congress was to begin. Pence did not attend the event.

“All Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the states to recertify and we become president and you are the happiest people,” Trump said, repeating a falsehood he has been promoting leading up to the congressional session.

Pence told Trump during their weekly lunch in the West Wing on Tuesday that he did not believe he had the power to unilaterally overturn electoral votes, according to a person briefed on the one-on-one conversation. This person was not authorized to publicly discuss the private discussion, which was first reported by The New York Times, and spoke on condition of anonymity.

Trump said he spoke with Pence on Wednesday morning to urge him to act once again. “I said Mike, that doesn’t take courage,” he said. “What takes courage is to do nothing.”

Pence has no such unilateral power under the Constitution and congressional rules that govern the count. It is up to the House and Senate to voice objections, and states’ electors were chosen in accordance with state law, not fraudulently.

“We’ve fought on every front on legally viable methods that are based on the Constitution of the United States. We don’t want anarchy here, folks,” said lawyer Jay Sekulow, who represented Trump during his impeachment, on his radio show Tuesday. Sekulow dismissed the notion that Pence could act to overturn the vote. “Elections have consequences,” Sekulow said.

Trump denied the report in a statement late Tuesday in which he continued to falsely assert Pence has powers he does not. But the Vice President, whose office declined to discuss his plans, was not expected to deliver on Trump’s request to overturn the electors, acknowledging he has no such unilateral power.

Pence had spent hours with staff and the Senate parliamentarian to prepare for Wednesday’s joint session, including studying the Electoral Count Act of 1887, which governs the proceedings, and relevant legal opinions.

“I think he will approach this as a constitutionalist, basically, and say, ’What’s my role in the Constitution as president of the Senate?’” said David McIntosh, president of the conservative Club for Growth and a Pence friend. “What he’ll do is allow anybody who is going to move to object to be heard, but then abide by what the majority of the Senate makes the outcome.”

In fulfilling one of the few formal responsibilities of the vice presidency, Pence risks compromising his own political future. Pence is eyeing a run for the White House in 2024 and is banking on his years of loyalty to Trump, who could be a political kingmaker for years to come, to help him stand out in what is expected to be a crowded field.

That means Pence must avoid angering Trump along with large numbers of Republican voters who have bought into the President’s unsupported claims of widespread election fraud and have been falsely led to believe that Pence has the power to reverse the outcome by rejecting the votes from states such as Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania that swung from Trump in 2016 to Biden in 2020.

With Pence’s decision Wednesday, he could face repercussions from Trump in the days, months and years to come.

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Republished with permission from the Associated Press and contribution from Florida Politics editor Janelle Irwin.