Vance Says He'd Have Gone Along With Trump's Plot To Block Certification of the 2020 Election
"I would have asked the states to submit alternative slates of electors and let the country have the debate," Vance said when asked if he'd refuse to certify the election.
If he had been vice president on January 6, 2021, Sen. J.D. Vance (R–Ohio) says he would have gone along with the Trump administration's plot to block Congress' certification of the 2020 election results.
"I would have asked the states to submit alternative slates of electors and let the country have the debate about what actually matters," Vance said during an appearance on the All-In podcast. When pressed by co-host Jason Calacanis to clarify whether he would have refused to certify the election, Vance stressed that he wanted to have "a big debate, and that doesn't necessarily mean the results would have been any different."
This sounds somewhat more innocuous than it is. What Vance is saying is that he would have gone along with the next steps in the procedure drawn up by some of then-President Donald Trump's lawyers (led by John Eastman), who crafted a plan to open up the certification process.
Understanding the full scope of Vance's answer requires a quick recap of how Trump's lawyers wanted January 6, 2021, to play out. The so-called Eastman memo outlined the necessary steps to prevent a transfer of power. It proposed that officials in a handful of states won narrowly by Joe Biden should submit alternative slates of electors and that then-Vice President Mike Pence should invoke his unilateral authority "without asking for permission—either from a vote of the joint session [of Congress] or from the [Supreme Court]"—to count only the Trump-supporting slates from those states.
If state legislators in Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and other disputed states failed to take the bait, there was a backup plan in which Pence would cite "all the evidence and the letters from state legislators calling into question the executive certifications" as grounds for refusing to count the votes from seven disputed states.
"At the end of the count, the tally would therefore be 232 for Trump, 222 for Biden," Eastman wrote. "Because the 12th Amendment says 'majority of electors appointed,' having determined that no electors from the 7 states were appointed…TRUMP WINS."
It's unknown whether this would have worked. Certainly, it would have drawn an immediate lawsuit from the Biden campaign, but it's unclear how the Supreme Court would have viewed its role in such a dispute.
Crucially, Pence refused to play his part in the scheme. For doing so, he's become a pariah in Republican politics—though he deserves to be remembered for maintaining his courage in the face of both a literal and metaphorical partisan mob.
Vance indicated in the All-In interview that he would be willing to do the opposite. Asked twice whether he would refuse to certify the election, Vance fell back both times to his claim that he would have simply asked states to submit alternative slates of electors and allowed Congress to have a debate about what to do.
That's a cowardly response that fails to give a clear answer, but there can be no doubt about the signal Vance is sending. He is effectively saying that he'd have followed the path outlined in the Eastman memo—a path that would allow the vice president to claim he was merely letting Congress debate the outcome, and then use the chaos and uncertainty created by that same debate to throw out the results from certain states in pursuit of a different outcome.
This is not the first time Vance has said he would have overseen the certification process differently than Pence did. In February, during an interview with ABC's George Stephanopoulos, Vance said that he would have "told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors, and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there."
That Vance was saying those things earlier in the year likely bolstered his chance of becoming Trump's running mate. The fact that he's still saying them now should be a more serious red flag about what he'd do if elevated to the position of vice president.
It's also worth engaging with the underlying notion here: that the country or Congress needs to debate the results of the election. That is also nonsense.
The country did debate the 2020 election. For months. Votes were cast, results were tallied, and the Electoral College determined the winner. The final certification of the results is not the time or place for that debate to take place. Indeed, the Trump campaign took advantage of many other opportunities that are built into the system to challenge results in specific places, and none of those efforts found systemic fraud or other reasons to doubt the outcome.
One of the great things about America's electoral system—despite its frustrations and faults—is how decentralized it is. It is robust exactly because there is no central office counting every vote, and there are myriad checks and double-checks that occur as results are passed upward from precinct to county to state and, finally, to Congress.
What Eastman proposed (and what Vance is nodding along with) is a reversal of all that: a substitution of the vice president's and Congress' opinion for the will of the voters. That's not constitutional, democratic, or even populist. It's just authoritarian.
