Former Vice President Mike Pence directly addressed former President Donald Trump’s claims that Pence had the power to overturn the election, The Associated Press reports,
What he said: “I heard this week that President Trump said I had the right to overturn the election. President Trump is wrong. I had no right to overturn the election. The presidency belongs to the American people, and the American people alone,” Pence said on Friday.
- “There are those in our party who believe that as the presiding officer over the joint session of Congress, I possessed unilateral authority to reject electoral college votes,” Pence said. “Under the Constitution, I had no right to change the outcome of our election.”
- “And Kamala Harris,” he added, “will have no right to overturn the election when we beat them in 2024.”
- “The truth is there’s more at stake than our party or our political fortunes,” he said, according to The New York Times. “If we lose faith in the Constitution, we won’t just lose elections — we’ll lose our country.”
Flashback: On Sunday, Trump said that Pence could have “overturned” the 2020 election on Jan. 6, 2021, as he watched over the counting of electoral college votes by Congress, according to The Washington Post.
- Trump has repeatedly expressed frustration that Pence did not reject the electoral college votes in the states that Biden had won.
The bigger picture: “The speech marked Pence’s strongest rebuke yet of Trump’s claims and efforts to get him to overturn the results of the 2020 election,” per The Washington Post.