“Coward”: Bannon Rips Mike Pence

Mike Pence recently gave a much-derided (on the right, at least) speech in which he attacked former President Trump and claimed that there was no way he could have intervened in the 2020 election. In that speech, he said:

“Our Founders were deeply suspicious of consolidated power in the nation’s capital and were rightly concerned with foreign interference if presidential elections were decided in the capital.

But there are those in our party who believe that as the presiding officer over the joint session of Congress, I possessed unilateral authority to reject electoral college votes. And I heard this week, President Trump said I had the right to ‘overturn the election’. President Trump is wrong…I had no right to overturn the election.”

[…]

“Under the Constitution, I had no right to change the outcome of our election. And Kamala Harris will have no right to overturn the election when we beat them in 2024.”

Watch him here:

“President Trump is wrong. I had no right to overturn the election,” said a defiant @Mike_Pence. pic.twitter.com/dfTMXCNpvQ

— Mediaite (@Mediaite) February 4, 2022

The thing is, Mike Pence isn’t correct, or at least not in the way he presents it. Thanks to precedent and rules stemming back to Reconstruction, technically the Vice President could have refused to accept the results and send them back to the states to ensure that there was no fraud.

Doing that would have required some serious backbone, something Pence doesn’t necessarily have.

But it would have been possible and was what Trump was asking for: he wanted Pence to help him fight the fraud, something Pence refused to do not because it was impossible but because he lacked the will to make it happen.

Steve Bannon pointed out as much, first hammering Pence for his false portrayal of what Trump wanted, saying “Wow. That’s not what President Trump said. What President Trump said is you had the full right to revert back to the states.”

He then went on to skewer Pence and criticize his chief of staff, Marc Short, saying:

Pence, you’re going to carry this thing, eventually, to your grave, Okay? Because it is a mark of shame, and you are a stone-cold coward.

[…]I can’t take Pence and Marc Short and all these Koch guys ratting out president Trump up on Capitol Hill right now.”

Bannon is right; Pence did have the ability to get involved and flex his power, yet he refused to do so. That wasn’t the bravery of a principled conservative taking some stand, but of a craven coward letting a vote that happened under a cloud of suspicious roll through without any roadblocks.

Trump argued as much in one of his recent “Save America” emails, arguing that Pence did indeed have the right to get involved and should have done so, saying:

“the Vice President’s position is not an automatic conveyor if obvious signs of voter fraud or irregularities exist. That’s why the Democrats and RINOs are working feverishly together to change the very law that Mike Pence and his unwitting advisors used on January 6 to say he had no choice. The reason they want it changed is because they now say they don’t want the Vice President to have the right to ensure an honest vote.

In other words, I was right and everyone knows it. If there is fraud or large scale irregularities, it would have been appropriate to send those votes back to the legislatures to figure it out. The Dems and RINOs want to take that right away. A great opportunity lost, but not forever, in the meantime our Country is going to hell!”

Trump and Bannon are on one side, the side much of the base has taken, and Pence is now aligned with the RINOs. It’s unfortunate to see another semi-promising conservative fall into their camp.

By: Gen Z Conservative, editor of GenZConservative.com. Follow me on Parler and Gettr.