The Pence Subpoena

News that special counsel Jack Smith has subpoenaed Vice President Pence in connection with the events of January 6, 2001, turns the nation’s attention to the one individual who was most dramatically tested that day. And the one who cleaved more courageously than any other to the Constitution. The prosecutors could do worse than ask for his autograph.That’s not to suggest that Mr. Pence deserves any special treatment. He isn’t above the law, and it’s hard to imagine his lawyers will argue that question any other way. Neither, though, is he below the law, to be denied any of the privileges that the Constitution might accord to any person in his offices — vice president of America, president of the Senate, and citizen. We don’t know what he’ll be asked or what, if any, privileges he might assert.No doubt there are those who would suggest that the Heroic Hoosier deserves no quarter, having served for four years under President Trump. We’d reply, as these columns pointed out on the morning of January 6, 2001, that constitutionally speaking the vice president does not serve “under” the president. The vice president does not report to the president. He or she can’t be fired by the president, instructed by him, or told what to say by him.A vice president might have been put forward by his running mate for the nomination of his party. He is, though, elected in his own right. He doesn’t — in our view, shouldn’t — work in the White House. There are serious figures who argue that he isn’t even a member of the executive branch but rather of the legislature, serving as president of the Senate. A president can’t order the vice president so much as to fetch a cup of coffee.This is why Mr. Pence was able to draw his own conclusions — different from the President’s — on how the Constitution ordained that he carry out his duties before the joint session of Congress at which the vote was to be unsealed January 6. One can imagine why Mr. Smith might want to question Mr. Pence, who, after all, met with Mr. Trump on January 5, 2001. That’s when Mr. Trump urged Mr. Pence to decertify the vote due to be opened.Mr. Pence has a moving account of the moment in his new book, “So Help Me God.” He had already consulted the constitutional parchment. He told the President that he lacked a grant of power to do what the President wanted. When Mr. Trump suggested the vice president wanted for courage, Mr. Pence rejected the libel, stood up, buttoned his coat, and walked to his own office, where he shut the door and sat down behind his desk.“The conversation had exhausted me,” Mr. Pence writes in his memoir. Then, as he looked at portraits of Lincoln, Jefferson, Adams, Coolidge, and Teddy Roosevelt, he thought of the passage, from Hebrews 12:1, reminding that our actions are observed by a “great cloud of witnesses” — a call to “let us throw off everything that hinders and the sin that so easily entangles. And let us run with perseverance the race marked out for us.”Then the vice president bowed his head, folded his hands, and — yes, right there on government property — prayed. Mr. Pence goes on to recall the moment President Coolidge lost his 16-year old son Calvin to an infection. Wrote Coolidge: “What might have happened to him under other circumstances we do not know, but if I had not been president.… In his suffering he was asking me to make him well. I could not. When he went, the power and glory of the Presidency went with him.”Mr. Pence reflects on it this way: “A sensibility such as this, and not power, is the source of presidential dignity, and must be restored. It depends entirely upon character, self-discipline, and an understanding of the fundamental principles that underlie not only the republic, but life itself.” This might not be how they talk in Washington these days. All the more reason for the special prosecutor to seek his wisdom.

The Pence Subpoena

The Pence Subpoena

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