Good. I prefer impeachment.
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Well, yes. But he could have invoked article 25 around 12/30 and still sat as acting president 'til the term expired
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The 25th has actually been used, both Reagan and Bush used it when they were in hospital for medical procedures.
Once again, Washington proves that there is literally NOTHING an elected official can do that will get them punished in any way shape or form. BTW, one of the injured DC policemen just died.
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This is the last straw. I move that BoingBoing hereafter always prefix Mike Pence’s name as:
Fascist Enabler and Theocrat Mike Pence
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…and (with) your little dog Pence too.
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Also the brass ring:
If he rallies to invoke the 25th, then he alienates all of the “deplorables”.
If he fails to resist those damned Democrats, who impeach tRump, then he reluctantly takes the position, the the tRumptards slobber up to him as their savior from the “libruls”…
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Trump also read the teleprompter in that robotic monotone that he always uses when he’s finally forced into saying something he doesn’t like. His detractors weren’t fooled and I suspect his supporters weren’t either. Just more ass-covering theater.
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I mean, the way the 25th works, he invokes it, he’s Acting President until Trump goes down to the hill and files the notice of ability, and then Trump’s immediately president again. The only way to override it after that is with a vote that’s even MORE stringent than impeachment’s majority in the house and 2/3rds in the senate. It’d never pass. Trump would then fire his cabinet and Pence will still be VP, but probably would cost himself any chance at a future nomination.
If we can’t get the votes to impeach him, we can’t get the votes to remove him via the 25th after Pence is acting VP for as long as it takes Trump to fax a piece of paper to congress.
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As for Pence, he’s wanted to be president since he was old enough to kiss a powerful person’s ass. He’s dodging phone calls now. I imagine he’s desperately trying to figure out which move would best protect his own ass. Once Trump is gone, enough Republicans will glad to be rid of him that too fulsome a defense of Trump might cloud Pence’s hope to be Mr 2024. On the other hand if he invokes the 25th he could (briefly) get the presidency he lusts after. Unfortunately he’d lose the support of all those Trump-worshiping “Christians” who put him in the administration in the first place. Pence’s best bet is to stall until the Democrats try to impeach. Then his ass is covered. He can claim it’s all a radical plot and return to his accustomed position between the Great Man’s glutes. If it were anyone but Trump the “President” would resign and Pence would immediately pardon him. However I can’t imagine Mr “I’m always the winner” Trump would agree to resign. My personal desire is that Trump would shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and that someone would be himself.
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bright side - end of Pence’s political career.
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So is Pence going to be diffucult to dislodge this year?
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If he did go for it (along with the rest of the Cabinet), then it would have more quickly lurched him into a position where Trump would ask him for a pardon. It’s possible that Pence (especially given the huge shit-show backlash and GOP abandonments taking place) figures it’s better if he (a proven coward and political bantamweight) not be placed in a position of being asked at all; the pressures from both sides would be enormous, and – whether he pardoned or not – the disgruntled side would track him down and relegate him to some living hell… or worse. Assuming all that as a temporary survival tactic, a pardon request would still be inevitable. Right now he must feel like a cornered rat with no means of escape. I wonder if he has already given Trump false hope of a pardon – plays for more time – then plans to quietly sneak off and go overseas earlier than announced and, unfortunately, oh, so sorry, be incommunicado when Trump green-lights the pardon request.
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His fingers were crossed behind his back, too, did you notice?
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I dunno if you have been on conservative media the last few days, but he already did that by refusing to overturn the election results during certification.
Lots of folks calling for him to be shot as a traitor. It’s very amusing if I don’t think about it too hard.
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Yeah. It’d be a lot funnier if trumpists didn’t have such a reliable track record of terrorism. Running people over, shooting protestors, that kind of thing.
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It might be that removing Trump would put Pence in the uncomfortable spot of being pressured to pardon Trump. I am betting that Pence is not interested in pardoning the man that just threw him under the bus.
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Well, in that circumstance he was asked to do something he couldn’t do. So if he did it, he was going to look foolish and it wouldn’t work anyways. Not doing it may have been seen as a betrayal (despite his best efforts to explain he couldn’t do it), but it was a passive one, a betrayal of inaction. Invoking the 25th would be a grand betrayal on top of that, and an active one. I suspect he’s calculating that the Trump base would be a lot less likely to forgive that.
(Of course, I think Pence has been seriously deluding himself if he thought he was going to have much of a political career in the future, or that he ever won over Trumpers, even before all this. I suspect whatever little he gained from whoring himself out to Trump has been lost now, and probably then some, as he’s also alienated everyone else.)
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Wouldn’t the fax machines in the Capitol Building all be broken and the fax not get through.
