Former Vice President Mike Pence explained to a crowd at the Iowa State Fair why he did not stop the certification of the 2020 presidential election results, slamming the idea that “one person could pick” the president as being “un-American.”
Speaking to a crowd of supporters for both Pence and former President Donald Trump, who had clashed with each other during a Q&A session the former vice president was taking part, Pence explained he had taken an “oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America.”
At the Iowa State Fair on Thursday, Pence had been asked by a Trump heckler why he committed “treason on Jan. 6” and didn’t “stand by President Trump,” to which another man stood up, pointed at the heckler, and said, “I am a veteran buddy. You shut your mouth!”
“Look, let me take you to Jan. 20, 2017. I put my left hand on Ronald Reagan’s Bible and I raised my right hand and I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States of America,” Pence told the crowd.
“Why did you commit treason on Jan. 6?” man asks Mike Pence at State Fair. Another man shouts the questioner down. Pence responds: pic.twitter.com/8ochbfyolu
— Iowa Starting Line (@IAStartingLine) August 10, 2023
Pence went on to explain that his son, who is serving as a captain in the U.S. Marine Corps, told him that it was “the exact same oath that he took. It was a promise I made to the American people. It was a promise I made to almighty God.”
The states have the power to “conduct our elections,” Pence said.
“If you read Article Two of the Constitution, which I recommend you very respectfully, Article Two says once the states send their electoral votes to the Congress of the United States, the vice president, as president of the Senate, will preside over a joint session of Congress, and what it says is at that joint session the electoral votes shall be opened and shall be counted,” Pence said.
Pence explained the Constitution doesn’t say that you can “send them back to the states,” or that you can “reject votes.”
“I mean look, there’s almost no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could pick the American president,” Pence told the crowd.
Pence, who has received criticism from Trump supporters for opting to not reject the election results of the 2020 presidential election, said during an interview on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that Trump’s lawyers had asked him to reject the votes.