3/4/21
What has come to be known as “the big lie” — the false and long-debunked claim that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump — was initially aimed at installing Trump in office for another term. But former Vice President Mike Pence’s op-ed on House Resolution 1 illustrates how it will live on through Republican efforts to use it for voter suppression. Just shy of two months after an insurrection in which rioters at the Capitol chanted, “Hang Mike Pence,” the former vice president reemerged on Wednesday with an op-ed for the Heritage Foundation that continues to push the same lies about election fraud that inspired Trump supporters to mob the Capitol in the first place. Pence isn’t arguing that Trump deserves another term, but his goal is political. He uses baseless insinuations that the 2020 election was stolen as an argument against HR 1. That legislation, which was passed on a party-line House vote on Wednesday includes “creating a national system for automatic voter registration, putting in transparency requirements for political advertising, and instituting nonpartisan redistricting commissions to end partisan gerrymandering,” as my colleague Ella Nilsen reports. In short, it will make voting easier in states where Republicans have intentionally made it challenging. And Pence thinks that’s a bad thing.
The former vice president crams two whoppers into the very first sentence of his piece. “After an election marked by significant voting irregularities and numerous instances of officials setting aside state election law, I share the concerns of millions of Americans about the integrity of the 2020 election,” Pence begins. There were no “significant voting irregularities” in the 2020 election, according to state election officials and the former president’s own election security chief. Unsurprisingly, Pence doesn’t present evidence beyond “concerns” that people have. But what he doesn’t mention is that those concerns are the product of lies he and other people in Trump’s orbit spent months pushing about Joe Biden’s victory being somehow tainted by fraud. It’s also not the case that there were “numerous instances of officials setting aside state election law.” When Trump’s lawyers tried to make that case in their legal challenges to the 2020 election, their arguments were dismissed by court after court, including by judges whom Trump appointed. Pence isn’t speaking out to call for Trump supporters to stand down, stop the threats, and cease the plotting. Instead, his new op-ed stokes the same grievances that inspired the violence and unrest to begin with — the false suspicion that Trump’s loss to Biden wasn’t legitimate, and that unless Republicans make it harder to vote, Democrats will cheat again.
