The office of the vice-presidency may not be worth a bucket of warm piss, as James Garner famously said, but at least it’s interesting. Garner also noted that the office is “a no man’s land somewhere between the legislative and executive branch.” This is a result of the vice-president’s constitutional role as president of the Senate, and we’ve recently seen these dual roles adjudicated in the courts. This came about as a result of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s (ultimately successful) efforts to compel Mike Pence to testify about the events surrounding the January 6, 2021 coup attempt. Pence argued that he could not be compelled to testify by Biden’s executive branch about duties he carried out in his legislative role as the president of the Senate. The case was heard by U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg, and Boasberg kind of split the baby. He agreed with Pence that he had some protection from the legislative Speech and Debate clause, but only in his narrow role of overseeing the actual counting of the Electoral College votes. More importantly, he found that Pence’s executive privilege claims failed because he had been asked to commit a crime.
U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg’s 19-page opinion — which the judge partially unsealed Friday at the urging of media organizations — cleared the way for special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecutors to question the former vice president about his conversations with a wide array of figures who leaned on him to reject Biden’s electors, possibly including Donald Trump.
“The bottom line is that conversations exhorting Pence to reject electors on January 6th are not protected,” Boasberg wrote in the ruling, dated March 27, adding, “There is no dispute in this case that Pence lacked the authority to reject certified electoral votes.”
Obviously there were some people willing to argue that Pence did have the authority to reject Biden’s victory, but once the issue landed in court there was no one willing to make that argument. As a matter of law, every time Donald Trump or anyone else asked Pence to launch a coup, they were engaging in a criminal conspiracy. It might be difficult to identify which statute was violated, but there is “no dispute” that it was an unlawful plan, and if it weren’t about the commission of a crime, then the judge could not have ruled as he did.
In any case, it’s worth noting that the question of whether Pence had the authority to overturn the election has been formally decided.
the mistake in the first line sort of spoils things, i get sidetracked imagining James Garner as VP.