If it wasn't clear already, it is now. January 6 was a coup attempt, and it had a good chance of working had Mike Pence been the wimp that Trump always thought he was. Pence is reported to have thought of himself as on a mission from God, and maybe this was it: to stand in the way of Trump's plot to stay in power. Would Kevin McCarthy have resisted Trump if he were in Pence's shoes? It's hard to say because I would not have thought that Pence would have the spine to do it, but he did. Perhaps McCarthy would have surprised us as well. I look forward in eager anticipation of his surprising me some day.
What became clearer to me from yesterday's testimony was how much pressure was placed on Pence, who told Trump that he was looking for every way possible to go along with the plot, but he couldn't find it. His chief counsel, Greg Jacob, told him there was no way. Michael Luttig told him there was no way. Dan Quayle told him there was no way. But right up to a phone conversation that Trump had with Pence on the morning of 1/6, Trump was putting all the pressure he could on him, shouting at him that he was a wimp and a pussy, and that he hadn't the courage to do what Trump wanted. And it became pretty clear that Trump was, at best, indifferent to Pence's safety in his tweeting to the angry mob that Pence had betrayed him--and them. And the mob reacted as we've all seen from previous video footage. There is testimony from and FBI agent embedded with the the Proud Boys that had they found Pence, they would have killed him.
So hats off to Mike Pence. I do not think he is a particularly good or admirable man, but few of us are, and our lives are often defined by doing what's called for in a particular moment. This was his moment, and he rose to the occasion despite a monstrous amount of pressure to get him to do otherwise. It was, so to say, his Sydney Carton moment--"a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done..." Maybe that's a bit much. Nevertheless I think that people are being unfair to him who say he was just doing his job.
What also became clear is that should Pence have gone along with the plot, we would have had a 'constitutional jump ball', to use Greg Jacob's phrase. It's not at all clear what would have happened. Eastman argued in his conversations with Jacob that the supreme court would have stayed out of it because of the 'political question doctrine'. If that were the case, then Jacob and Eastman both understood that the question would have to be resolved in the streets. Let that sink in. Eastman and Trump were willing to create the conditions for a violent defense of this coup, and it's clear now why all those weapons were being held in reserve by the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers in the D.C. suburbs.
But what if the court took the case and decided against Trump and Pence, who would enforce it? The executive branch? Trump/Pence would still be running it, and they certainly wouldn't enforce the court ruling. Perhaps DOJ would revolt, but it's clear now why it was so important to get Jeffrey Clark in place at DOJ. Had Pence gone along with the plot, no doubt Rosen would have been fired and a plot-compliant Clark would have been appointed AG. Would the military intervene? Under whose authority? General Milley's? But then that would be a military coup against a sitting president. Would he do that? Would others in the military follow his lead? Perhaps, if he were to pledge his allegiance to Biden, despite his not yet being officially certified or sworn in as President and Commander in Chief. Would pro-Trump factions within the military violently resist? Who knows? That's the point. Nobody knows how this would have played out. It would be chaos, and Trump thrives on chaos.
So it's clear that all the Trump people saw Pence as the weak link. If he caved, it was a jump ball, and there was a very, very good chance that Trump could have stayed in power. At the very least there would have been a crisis unlike anything we've experienced in American history. Luttig was called upon to make that point rather emphatically. All this in the service of a sociopath, and yet it's still very unlikely that neither he nor many of the the people in Congress who were complicit in this plot will be held accountable. Eastman and Giuliani are in trouble and maybe a few other minor players. But will Garland go after Trump, Meadows, and the coup-compliant in Congress? Clearly the committee is giving him all he needs to do so. But it's a bad precedent, and he has good reason to be worried that should the GOP take the White House in '24, the new AG will come after him. That's where all this is going if the Dems lose in November and then again in '24. When it comes to revenge and reprisals, we ain't seen nothin yet.
That's the thing. This isn't over.