After breaking with his boss last week and certifying President-elect Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory over President Trump, Vice President Mike Pence this week quickly shot down a push by House Democrats urging him to invoke the 25th Amendment of the Constitution to remove Trump from the presidency.
A veteran Republican consultant who’s close to the Trump orbit tells Fox News that the decision by the vice president was less of a move to defend the president but rather of Pence doing “what’s right.”
“Mike Pence looks at this as what should Mike Pence do that’s right,” emphasized the strategist, who asked for anonymity to speak more freely.
Just as Pence last week resisted the president’s repeated calls to upend the election results by refusing to accept the Electoral College results in a handful of states where Biden narrowly edged Trump, he also rejected the move by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and congressional Democrats to remove the president from office just a week before the end of his term by invoking the 25th Amendment.
Pence said invoking the 25th Amendment is not “in the best interest of our Nation or consistent with the Constitution.”
“He thinks it’s a huge stretch what they’re doing,” the strategist noted. “Mike Pence is going to do what he believes, and what he believes is that the Constitution doesn’t allow this. Whether it helps or hurts Donald Trump, that’s what he was going to do. If you notice the letter he sent to Congress last night, he’s not writing that for any political reason. He believes they’re greatly overstepping – that it doesn’t fit to what the 25th Amendment says.”
After staying loyal to the president for four and a half years – dating back to the summer of 2016 when Trump named the then-Indiana governor as his running mate, Pence now appears to be charting his own course.