Will Pence be the Brutus to Trump’s Caesar?
Chestnut van Bramer | January 8, 2021
Will Michael Pence be the Brutus to Trump’s Caesar? Whispers of the 25th amendment reportedly echo through the cabinet as Proud Boys are pushed away from the United States Capitol. A pandemic rages, and America is like, four really bad days away from civil war. Joe Biden is riding on a lot of hope, enough to win the most votes of any candidate to ever run for the office of the presidency, but will need to be the next FDR to successfully unite America. This is the state of the Union. And Mike Pence has a choice.
So what’s Pence’s choice? To invoke the 25th amendment and take Donald Trump out of the office of the President for the next crucial 12 days. Outside of the protests today, 3,964 people died because of COVID-19, and with rumors of botched vaccine distribution, it’s going to get worse before it gets better. That’s 1.3 times the deaths attributed to 9/11 according to a quick google search, and with deaths climbing every day, tomorrow will likely have even more. And Mike Pence has to make a choice.
Vice President Mike Pence can take the office of the President, and has apparently already taken a step by deploying the national guard, which was not technically within his power, to defend the Capitol. If he can spare the country 12 days of Trump-inspired election fraud bullshit, and Biden can take swift and meaningful control of the government, the United States might still be salvageable. But most reasonable people understand that 12 more days of the Don won’t leave anything for Biden to salvage.
If Pence takes office and cooperates with the Biden administration, it can gain valuable time and access to valuable information, and the United States as we understand it can continue to exist. The Constitution has been treated roughly this year, to say the least, and America is more divided than it has ever been.
2020 has been a year of hunger, mass graves, chewed nails and lonely drunks. Anyone trying to take the pandemic seriously is isolated, relying on the internet to bring them to social gatherings. A united Democratic government might be able to help with larger stimulus checks and well placed local business funds, but a bipartisan government could change the game. For that to work, the Republicans are going to have to vote against party lines, and a Pence presidency could begin that precedent. Because precedent is what the American government has always run on.
Often, the precedents were really awful, but they also created this difficult-to-describe story, full of the one idea that united all of the founding fathers—tyranny was unacceptable. The most important precedents are around transfer of power, something that’s been a hot topic lately. The President has been the most powerful person in the country, but they also had to concede to the vote. With no choice in the matter, they always followed the same steps after the media called the vote. A concession, followed by cooperation towards a peaceful transition.
America has always kept it’s vote extremely safe in the confines of it’s bureaucracy, because the United States worships it. We store the Constitution in a building that looks like it belongs in Rome. It’s a uniting idea around which Americans have fought, killed, and died for almost every day since the country’s first Whiskey Rebellion. But the Constitution has a metaphorical thermal exhaust port, built on purpose by it’s makers because of that uniting idea—tyranny was unacceptable.
In granting the Freedoms of speech, guns, and gathering, it essentially legalized rebellion to stop it’s government from becoming tyrannical. But anti-tyranny sentiment was the only idea holding together a vast stretch of farming and manufacturing colonies that held the seeds of its destruction in its greatest hypocrisy-creating a state without a central figure, in the name of ending tyranny while building the monuments to itself with the blood, sweat and tears of slave labor.
That flaw has blossomed throughout the history of the union, becoming a cancer that we missed the opportunity to operate on and now we have to radiate out of the citizenship with education reforms, infrastructure reforms, corporate reforms, tax reforms, pandemic response and police reforms that will require a societal shift the likes of which haven’t been seen since World War 2. And if Chick-fil-A loving, Queer hating (but gay bunny owning) Mike Pence can betray Donald Trump, and enough Republicans were spooked enough by today’s terrorist attacks to fracture the party, a likely possibility, then the nation can begin to heal under Biden.
