This is turning into a nightmare for Mike Pence
The January 6 investigation is just beginning and yet it’s already shaping up to be a PR nightmare for the party that helped to incite the attack on the Capitol. On Tuesday, Rep. Madeleine Dean (D-PA) called on Sens. Ted Cruz and Rand Paul to testify before the committee. It was already rather obvious that Cruz was inciting people to participate in an insurrection – with video evidence of him using dangerous rhetoric just days before the attack on the Capitol took place, and Rand Paul gave some reasons to be skeptical with his particular defensiveness of the phone records subpoenaed by Congress.
Now that a memo has dropped implicating Mike Pence in a fairly larger scheme to overturn the election than we’ve been led to believe, there’s definitely some answers the public deserves to have. Aside from just refusing to count the votes, the six-point memo calls on both Ted Cruz and Rand Paul to use the filibuster to prevent Congress from ratifying the results. Of course, the odds of pulling the scheme off are non-existent and at best, would have tied up the official count reporting while slowing down government proceedings that usually take forever on a good day.
This was all about trying to make Donald Trump feel good about himself – even at the risk of causing civil unrest in the streets – provoking episodes like the Capitol insurrection or something much worse. We may be about to find out a whole lot more. At the very least, we’ve learned that people like Cruz or Paul should never be trusted with the power of the Senate majority again just by having their names appear on this document – and now we have a guarantee of making the January 6 committee investigation an issue again in 2022.
James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making