Ringo Starr Wishes He Were This Lucky
The Inevitable Coming of the Pence Administration, and Its Inevitable Crisis of Legitimacy
Apart from thinking that “Trump-Pence” is hard to say because of the back-to-back plosives, and that “trumpence” sounds like an old English legal term, I was unable to give Mike Pence much thought when he first got the VP nod last summer. I was still in deep Trump denial, which precluded thinking about his subordinates in any detail. Up until he clinched the nomination, I had successfully avoided watching the primary debates or rally speeches, or really allowed myself to hear Trump say more than five words at any point. I simply refused to accept that he was part of the American political process.
Once I admitted to myself that Trump was the Republican nominee, I took some comfort in Mike Pence’s nomination. His presence on the ticket meant that the “real” Republicans still wanted nothing to do with the Donald. He was so desperate for a halfway-credible running mate that he had to reach for an unpopular red-state governor who went straight from right-wing talk radio to the House. It was a source of great hope to see that, even after the fat man won the pennant, the only people he could get on his bandwagon were has-beens with nothing to lose politically, and Pence was simply the most credentialed, least bridge-obstructing of the bunch. His nomination only proved to me that the whole Trump campaign was a big joke, in my now-shattered foolish innocence. I miss those days.
Ten months later, there’s an ever-better chance that Mike Pence could become the president, and it’s getting easier and easier for us all to accept. These four months of Trump doing insane things for no reason have nothing if not lowered our standards, and the possibility of handing power to a smug loaf of Calvinist wonder bread almost sounds like a return to normalcy. After all, Pence speaks English, and he knows what laws are. We as a people are submitting to the same psychological mechanism as a girl being pawed at by a guy until she’s too worn down to say no anymore — even if she finds the dude entirely repellent, a healthy young woman is supposed to have a president, so whatever, let it be this creep.
That is a resignation that we must resist. We need to stand up for the integrity of the republic, and throw this dude out of our dorm before he slithers into his prize. Even if he was completely innocent of any collusion with Russia, Mike Pence would still become president because he was desperate enough to take a longshot bet on a crook who betrayed his country to win (with a minority vote) and then rode that betrayal to personal power. The constitution may say he’s next in line, but the ascendance of President Pence will not be not a resolution to our present democratic crisis.
We’ve established that Pence knew about Flynn’s sketchballery before the transition even hired him, thus implicating him in the obstruction controversy. Depending on the depth of the collusion with Russia, he may have been elected on a ticket that was effectively a criminal conspiracy. Leaving that or any other as-yet-unproven accusations aside, he has definitely been carrying water for flagrant public corruption — the chief difference between poor people selling food stamps for 70 cents on the dollar, and Trump going to Mar-a-Lago every weekend so he can charge the Secret Service for the rooms? Poor people need that food stamp money for survival, not debt service. Pence is deeply tainted, and if Donald goes, he needs to go too.
For all the talk of the Nixonian precedents to our current situation, Pence presents a problem the nation never faced during Watergate. When Spiro Agnew, perhaps the shadiest Marylander of all time, resigned from the vice presidency in 1973, he deprived us of a chance to establish a precedent for our coming political crisis. Like Pence, he was complicit in a dirty campaign and a member of the thuggish cabal involved. Unlike Pence, he resigned well before Nixon, so when Tricky Dick did leave, we had an innocent-ish outsider waiting on deck in Gerald Ford. The public was out for blood and Ford was hanging on by a thread, but he at least had the baseline of credibility needed to do the job and begin healing the country. A crisis was averted, but future generations were denied a ready political solution for the crimes of an even bigger crook.
Mike Pence is not Gerald Ford. Gerald Ford didn’t spend a year covering for Nixon’s blatant lies, throwing dismissive eye rolls at anyone who dared question the president. Gerald Ford didn’t write off every attack on democratic norms with a stonewall, an evasion, or a stream of self-satisfied conservative platitudes and thought-terminating clichés. Gerald Ford didn’t head up the interview process for the Watergate Burglars.
Even if you don’t buy all that, and this is all raving liberal hysteria in your mind: Gerald Ford went into the job knowing that the nation was traumatized, and reconciliation was his chief goal. Mike Pence has spent his political career charging into divisive social-issues fights regardless of the cost. Speaking as a member of the church he left in order to spend more time handling snakes and speaking in tongues: Mike Pence is a theocratic zealot, who believes it is God’s will for men in power to pick divisive fights over abortion and gay rights.
He blew millions of dollars of state money defending his indefensible “religious freedom” bills in court, because it was the right thing to do in his mind. His entire career history (and his former gubernatorial opponent) attest that he will not show humility before his circumstances, if he has the power to use his office to do God’s will. He will be a Christian soldier for a country that needs him to be a good shepherd, and he will see every unwinnable values-voter conflagration he starts as a divine mandate in action. Again, I’m strangely comforted by the thought of someone knowing at least knowing why they’re blowing up the world, and doing it for a discernable reason or principle, but that’s just the low expectations set by his current boss talking.
To be clear, and here’s where we head into the woods: I’m suggesting that the resolution to this crisis has to come from congressional legislative action to set a specific remedy for these circumstances, not from our current constitutional script. If Pence stepped aside, we’d get Ryan. He’s not legally compromised by Trump but definitely is on a political and spiritual level, not to mention he’s a terrible politician who’s as rigidly ideological in the service of Mammon as Pence is in service of God. But given the recent history of the United States Congress, how could I think such a compromise could get through? Allow me to explain my delusion.
A snap election would be constitutionally impossible, and even if we powered through those doubts, federal judges would spend generations erasing everything that the winner did, because if a president isn’t properly installed under the auspices of Article II then everything they do is unconstitutional. A rush constitutional amendment to legitimize a snap election would never happen, for the same reasons that non-rushed ones don’t work out. Also, the GOP’s shamelessness makes it impossible for them to do the right thing: that is to say, the team that fouled the ball giving it up to the other team. In fact, we actually have someone waiting in the wings who has more democratic legitimacy than the current president, but she is sadly the most criminal, untrustworthy person on Earth, who only ever wanted to be president for her own personal gain. And her emails… good God, the horror.
That fantasy aside, I’m assuming that the GOP has some capacity for shame buried deep within the recesses of its subconscious, and I’m banking on this crisis awakening it and opening them up to compromise. For as much as they hate most Americans, Republicans don’t hate America, and I think they might feel sorta bad about their party running a traitor and then unconditionally backing everything he does. Or, at least they would feel bad once it was publicly proven. Anyway, it would bring a bunch of them to the table to craft an alternative plan, and we could get a credible Republican into office. Which leaves us with one option.
If we threw it to him, the GOP wouldn’t have to give up the presidency, and Democrats could feel safe that the White House is occupied by the only Republican sucking air who actually deserves America’s trust, except for maybe John Kasich or Mitt Romney. In fact, he’s a man who we almost made the president twice, who no human being could call undeserving of the job. He’s a man who was broken, bled out, and beaten for years, sustained by his belief in his country, who then came back from the dead to represent the great state of Arizona. He’s a man who personally got the ball rolling on taking down a bent president, from his own party no less. He’s a man whose temperament is… actually, kind of a problem, but it looks downright unimpeachable in present company. In short, he’s the man we need right now, and unlikely as that possibility might be, it’s one we should pursue.
