President Trump has spent much of the last few days — and much of a rambling speech he delivered near the Capitol on Wednesday — pressuring his unerringly loyal vice president to facilitate an extralegal scheme to wrest back the presidency from Joe Biden. In Trump’s dream scenario, Pence would use Wednesday’s joint session of Congress, which will certify Biden’s victory, to simply reject the official count and hand the election to Trump — despite the fact that the veep’s powers, as spelled out in the Constitution, are explicitly ceremonial.
But ahead of that event, Pence made clear in a letter that he would not take the dramatic action his boss so craves. “I share the concerns of millions of Americans about the integrity of this election,” Pence writes, throwing a bone to the president and his party’s conspiracy caucus. But “It is my considered judgment that my oath to support and defend the constitution constrains me from claiming unilateral authority to determine which electoral votes should be counted and which should not.”
Read the whole thing below:
