Vice President Pence and the Pundits

The tale told by the January 6 committee found its hero in Vice President Pence, who resisted pressure from President Trump and a restive mob in refusing to count the votes in the Electoral College certified by the states. Instead, Mr. Pence bowed to the Constitution, which assigned him the task of opening the certified ballots and being present when they were counted. Amid the craziness, Mr. Pence held firm. The committee’s chairman, Representative Bennie Thompson, noted: “Thanks in part to Mike Pence, our democracy withstood Donald Trump’s scheme and the violence of January 6.” On that day in 2021, the mob reached within 40 feet of the vice president, and he was forced into an underground bunker for hours. The crowd erected a gallows amid chants of, “Hang Mike Pence.” All of this is the stuff of which glory is woven, or so one might believe — unless one turned to the precincts of the progressive commentariat. In the New York Times, columnist Jamelle Bouie complains of Mr. Pence that he “did not go above and beyond his constitutional obligations. He simply chose not to break the law.” Refusing to bestow the label “heroic” on Vice President Pence, Mr. Bouie went on to assess that “he did close to the absolute minimum of what we should expect from a person in his position.” Garlands tossed his way are the results of “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”Efforts to deflate Mr. Pence were also undertaken by Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post. She reckoned Mr. Pence “could have promptly conceded the race, even if Trump did not. He could have denounced the ‘big lie.’ He could have gone to the FBI or spoken publicly about Trump’s pressure campaign.”This line of critique was picked up by CNN’s editor at large, Chris Cillizza, who calls Mr. Pence “a man divided. Or, at least, a man looking for a way out of a political corner.” The image of Mr. Pence as an “utterly resolute American hero” is not “an entirely accurate representation of the former vice president’s mindset in the days leading up to January 6.” This skepticism is fueled in part by reporting from journalists Robert Woodward and Robert Costa, who relate that Mr. Pence consulted with a predecessor, Dan Quayle, telling the one-time veep, “You don’t know the position I’m in,” to which Mr. Quayle responded, “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.”For his part, Mr. Trump told the Faith and Freedom Conference in Tennessee, “I never called Mike Pence a wimp. Mike Pence had a chance to be great. He had a chance to be, frankly, historic. But just like Bill Barr and the rest of these weak people, Mike did not have the courage to act.” Among loyalists to Mr. Trump, Mr. Pence remains an object of scorn. Even a man of the right who is a committed Never-Trumper, Bret Stephens, admitted that he was “having a hard time joining the ‘Mike Pence the Hero’ bandwagon that some of my old friends on the right have jumped aboard.” He went on to taxonomize Mr. Pence as “a worm who, for a few hours on Jan. 6, turned into a glowworm.” Mr. Stephens’s colleague at the New York Times, Maureen Dowd, noted in relation to Mr. Pence, “The fate of a sycophant is never a happy one,” a phrase she found so resonant she repeated it twice in her column on the subject. She observed how Mr. Pence, the bludgeoned sycophant, was forced to learn a “hard, almost fatal, lesson” on January 6. The notion that doing one’s duty is not the bare minimum but a high aspiration, and that pressure and temptation does not lessen holding that line but amplifies it, was known well to no less a thinker than the poet John Milton. A republican and apostle of free speech, Milton was well known to the Founders who imagined the processes Mr. Pence was called on to superintend. In Milton’s masterwork, “Paradise Lost,” Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden are described as “sufficient to stand though free to fall,” highlighting that even though they had the ability to make the wrong choice, they possessed the potential to make the right one. To judge by the press, Mr. Pence is being graded on a much more demanding curve. The Bible, in which Vice President Pence is a devout believer, has something to say about that, as well: “Judge not, that ye be not judged.”

Vice President Pence and the Pundits

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