Oliver Contreras/Sipa USA via AP Images
Greg Jacob, left, former counsel to Vice President Mike Pence, and J. Michael Luttig, retired judge for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and informal adviser to Pence, testify during Thursday’s January 6th Committee hearing.
At one point in his exquisitely detailed testimony to the January 6th congressional committee, former Mike Pence chief counsel Greg Jacob related one of his multiple conversations with John Eastman, the Trump-über-alles attorney who contended that Pence by his lonesome could overturn the 2020 presidential election. How did he think the nine Supreme Court justices would come down, Jacob asked Eastman, if asked to decide whether the vice president could declare Trump the victor or suspend the January 6th electoral vote tallying, so that (Republican) state legislatures could certify pro-Trump electors even though Trump had lost their state?
Eastman ventured that he’d lose 7-2. Jacob countered that it would be more like 9-0, and when pressed, Eastman concurred.
If up to me, I’d split the difference. Given what we’re beginning to learn about Ginni Thomas’s communications with Eastman, which the committee’s staff is delving into, and given that her hubs, Clarence Thomas, was the sole justice to dissent from a ruling compelling Trump to hand over documents to the January 6th Committee, I’d guess that Thomas would side with Eastman’s arguments in favor of stratospherically augmented vice-presidential powers. Everyone without Ginni Thomas as a spouse would not, although it’s always possible, as Eastman must have hoped, that that most precedent-be-damned-in-favor-of-killing-the-libs justice, Sam Alito, might be persuaded.
Thursday’s committee hearing didn’t break any conceptual new ground. We already knew that Pence’s staff and attorneys, led by Jacob, and senior officials in the White House counsel’s office, among many others, had determined that Pence had no such authority to do what Trump demanded of him. We already knew that Trump had heard from these officials. We already knew that Trump embraced Eastman’s mishegas (a technical legal term) as his last, desperate bid to cling to power. We already knew that Trump had repeatedly pressured Pence to go along with it, and that Pence had resisted. And we already knew from live TV footage on the 6th that the mob at the Capitol had chanted “Hang Mike Pence.”
Jacob appeared in the hearing room to testify to all of this (we heard from others via their videotaped testimony), and he and his colleagues added numerous piquant details. We learned of repeated meetings he and his colleagues had with Eastman, in which the Rasputin wannabe went back and forth on whether Pence could simply overturn the election or merely halt the electoral ratification to ask Republican legislatures to overturn it instead. We learned that when talking just to Jacob, his fellow Chicago Law School alum, Eastman would concede “just between us Chicago chickens” that legally, both of his theories were so much hooey. We learned from Trump staffers, and from Ivanka herself, that Trump had erupted in rage during a phone call with Pence on the morning of the 6th, calling him a “wimp” and a “pussy.” (Ivanka allowed as how she’d not heard her pop speak to Pence quite that way before, though the nation has heard Trump say at least one of those words before, on an Access Hollywood bus.)
It was inevitable that today’s hearings would burnish the reputation of Mike Pence to a far larger number of sentient Americans than was ever the case before.
Until the hearing, though, we hadn’t actually seen the videotaped testimony of Eastman taking the Fifth, which he did at least 100 times while being questioned. And we didn’t know until it was put up on the big screen that after January 6th but before January 20th, Eastman had emailed Rudy Giuliani asking that his name be added to those seeking presidential pardons before Trump left office.
The other live witness before the committee was retired federal judge Michael Luttig, an icon in conservative legal circles, who has written powerfully that Trump’s efforts to overturn the election endangered the republic then, and that Trump and his followers’ ongoing indifference to the rule of law still constituted a “clear and present danger” to the nation. When testifying, Luttig appeared to weigh every single word, down to the last milligram, before uttering it. In that sense, he sometimes seemed the personification of what Hamlet (well, Shakespeare) termed “the law’s delay,” but as far as imparting gravitas went, he came as close to Moses descending Mount Sinai as I ever hope to get. (Actually, with one of the world’s craggier faces, he came off more as Mount Sinai than Moses.)
It was inevitable that today’s hearings would burnish the reputation of Mike Pence to a far larger number of sentient Americans than was ever the case before, even as it would also alienate more Trumpian Republicans (which is almost, though not completely, a redundancy) than previously. As every one of Pence’s positions is repugnant to liberals and most moderates, and as his future campaigns, if any, must be waged within the Republican Party, that means that politically, Pence is as close to dead as any living being can be—even though he rates whatever footnotes history will accord him for not being swept along in a neofascist coup.
Still, that’s a very low bar to clear. And no one should forget that but for resisting that coup, Pence supported and advanced every bigoted, cruel, dangerous, and cockeyed idea and policy that his boss came up with. He’s no more a great statesman for doing what was at every moment obvious and reflexive than the Professional Golfers’ Association is a fount of progressive values for not being Mohammed bin Salman’s new League of Putters and Dismemberers.
