Is there a worm more slithery than Mike Pence?
For four long years as top courtier in the court of Don the Con, he affixed his lips to Trump’s capacious tush, only to be hunted by a MAGA mob calling for his head – and yet, after all that, he’s still refusing to do what’s right, to come clean with the authorities who’ve sworn to uphold the rule of law.
Have you heard about his latest attempt to worm his way free of accountability? Suffice it to say that ex-Republican strategist Stuart Stevens got it right yesterday when he quipped that “the FBI can search Mike Pence’s home everyday for the next twenty years and they’re not going to find the spine of Mike Pence.”
it was reported last week that Pence has been subpoenaed by special counsel Jack Smith, who seeks the ex-veep’s testimony about his boss’ fascist plot to overturn the ’20 election. It’s already on record, thanks to various aides’ testimony, that Trump phoned Pence on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021 (mere hours before Pence was tasked with certifying Joe Biden’s victory), and that Trump raged at his underling, warning that unless Pence joined the coup, he would henceforth be known as a “pussy.”
But today Pence doesn’t want to go under oath to confirm the obvious. Somehow he has convinced himself that he has a shot at the 2024 Republican presidential nomination (my cat has better odds); mindful of his delusional ambitions, the last thing he wants to do now is re-agitate MAGA voters by helping the Justice Department (MAGA voters have already written him off). So his last-ditch strategy is to Smith’s subpoena with cowardly creativity:
Via his lawyers, Pence reportedly contends that if he were to testify in the Justice Department probe, it would violate the Constitution’s separation of powers. How so? Because the DOJ is part of the executive branch, whereas Pence, on that fateful Jan. 6, in his role as electoral-vote counter, was acting in his ceremonial capacity as President of the Senate – as a member of the legislative branch.
There’s something very wormy about that argument…Can’t quite put my finger on it…Oh wait, I know!
Last year, the House’s Jan. 6 committee also sought Pence’s testimony, but he refused to appear. Take a guess what his argument was. He said that cooperating with the committee would violate the Constitution’s separation of powers – because the panel was part of the legislative branch, whereas he, as vice president, was a member of the executive branch.
Good grief. This is like Lewis Carroll (Alice in Wonderland) meets Joseph Heller (Catch-22).
Or, as legal analyst Benjamin Wittes says of Pence, “He can’t be an executive branch official when Congress wants to hear from him and a legislative branch official when the Justice Department wants to hear from him.”
But notwithstanding his craven behavior – hiding every which way behind the Constitution, to avoid testifying about a coup that slimed the Constitution – we should salute his cleverness. He has bought himself some time, because it will likely take many months for the courts to sort out his separation-of-powers gambit. It’s possible that special counsel Smith doesn’t need Pence’s testimony in order to indict Trump – perhaps Pence would just be the icing on the cake – but justice delayed (yet again) seems akin to justice denied.
And who knows what Pence would say if he did testify; mindful of the MAGA mob that made his hangman’s noose, he’d probably pull a Frank Pentangeli. In Godfather II, when called to testify about the crimes of Don Michael Corleone, Pentangeli wormed his way out: “I don’t know nuthin’ about that. Oh! I was in the olive oil business with his father, but that was a long time ago, that’s all!”
Pentangeli, to prove his loyalty, later bled himself to death in a bathtub. No need for Pence to go that far. Politically, as well as morally, he’s already dead.