McCarthy writes for NRO, thus almost anything he thinks is suspect. (We just heard that Crazy Annie Coulter also mis-characterized this whole thing. Crazy Annie went over the edge about 4 years ago....)
On the question of Pence's authority to 'count the votes,' it's not 'suspect.' It's flat-out infirm. Here's Eastman, a ConLaw scholar:
...All this by way of background to show that whether or not Vice President Pence had the constitutional authority to determine that certain slates of electors were invalid remains an open question. Andrew McCarthy’s claim in a January 8 article in The Hill that “what the president pressured [Vice President Pence] to do was blatantly lawless” is therefore quite inaccurate, though it has certainly been regurgitated in one form or another by others in numerous other media outlets.
But whether it is accurate or not, that was not what the vice president was asked. ...
So not only was McCarthy wrong, he didn't even get the question right. TDS affects his brain....
...[Trump's letter:] “And all we are demanding of Vice President Pence is this afternoon at 1:00 he let the Legislatures of the States look into this so we get to the bottom of it and the American people know whether we have control of the direction of our government or not.”
In other words, the vice president was not being asked to decide the matter himself, but to pause the proceedings long enough to give the couple of states whose legislators had asked for more time to assess whether the illegal conduct by their state election officials—illegal conduct that Pence himself twice acknowledged in his statement—was sufficient to warrant revoking the existing certification and submitting a new one that accurately reflected the state’s vote, just as Hawaii had done in 1960. ...
...The difficulty was that the existing slates of electors had not been certified after an election conducted “pursuant to [the states’] own laws.” Pence was simply being asked to provide the state legislatures in the contested states with the time necessary to properly assess the legitimacy of their electoral votes....
Eastman shreds Pelosi, Schumer, Turtle, and the House minority leader (who cares what his name is?) for ignoring and blatantly VIOLATING other portions of the law.
Pence was flim-flammed. He's never been regarded as an intellectual giant and his losing record on important issues in Indiana cannot be disputed.
In the end: Trump won the election. Biden* is inaugurated. You lived through history!
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