Four years ago, Mike Pence hated presidential overreach. This week he piped up to defend it. What happened?
Vice President Mike Pence looked uncomfortable. President Donald Trump had just announced his power was “total,” that the president has “the ultimate authority” over the states at Monday’s White House coronavirus task force briefing. Pence was asked whether he agreed. The vice president shifted uncomfortably, looked straight ahead and dutifully delivered his talking points.
For his entire previous political career, six terms in Congress and four years as governor, Pence vociferously dug in, in deeply principled terms, against what he saw as overreach from the White House and Washington. In defending Trump’s claims of absolute power, Pence bucked a career-long ideological commitment to federalism—one he ardently espoused in speeches, op-eds and interviews with journalists.
Story continues“Federalism explains a great deal of American exceptionalism and the extraordinary progress of economic growth and influence of our nation over the past 200 years,” Pence said in a June 2014 speech to the Federalist Society in Indianapolis. I believe that reinvigorating federalism in this country is essential to restoring the fortunes of our nation.
“What happened to the guy that fought for the Medicaid waiver?” Tom LoBianco, the vice president’s biographer, asked me. “He fought for two years on that.”
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