Pence Says Trump Shouldn’t Be Disqualified Even If CONVICTED — Says ‘That Needs To Be Left To The American People’

(Getting this out of the way first: I'm not a Trump supporter.)

Convicted felons can and have run for President in the past. Some campaigns have even been run from prison. Disqualifying somebody from running for office because of a conviction is extremely easy to weaponize. It's the next step in removing somebody's right to vote because of a conviction (a thing we do/have done and shouldn't).

I agree with you on the age thing, though. If you can vote, you should be able to hold office.

If this actually works, the next step will be abolishing the two-term limit. "Leave it to the will of the people to decide if they want a dictatorship."

Well, basically, this is the gist of "a republic, if you can keep it". At the end of the day, my boy Montesquieu's words hang over all government like a spectre. Governments rule only by the consent of the governed. If everyone woke up tomorrow and decided we wanted Lenin's mummified goatee to be president, constitution be damned, Biden be damned, it'd be the president.

Might as well ditch the citizenship requirement while we're at it.

There's a good case to be made that the 35 year old restriction is dumb and should be amended out.

They were never the law and order party. They were and are the put minorities and poor in prison party.

Remember it's all about hurting the right people.

So, the rules matter when they lose to popular vote but win in the Electoral College, but don't matter when they are arrested?

What is next on their agenda? Making lynching legal, as it is a decision by the people, for the people, or what?

This is the best answer.

An assault on Trump is an assault on the idiots who made it their identity to support him.

They can't let him be insulted.

The only winning move is to just offer a better solution and ignore him.

It's sad how quickly they forget the buttery males. Ol' "lock her up" Hillary "basket of deplorables" Clinton was so deserving of jail time because of those emails, but insurrection and election fraud? Nah. Those are locker room felonies.

The GOP is a joke and the rubes that choose to plug their ears and ignore the obvious are clowns 🤡🇺🇸

It's probably going to be a new Trump party if he's not nominated so for Republicans they need him. It's the same with right wing media. Trump has such broad support that there's no way anyone on the right can effectively oppose him at this point.

I agree with the sentiment that his actions should preclude him from running, but felon disenfranchisement is something that isn't talked about nearly enough and I think it's absolutely insane so many people lose their RIGHT to vote.

The worst part about all this is many who stormed the capital had nice businesses, trucks and income. I agree with the need to study this brain-dead disease though. Either our population is more absurdly stupid than is measurable or they all ate lead paint chips as a child.

14th amendment, section 3.

Personally I think anyone should be able to run for president. Regardless of your status. The Constitution is a flawed document. The 2A along with that point should not be in there.

That being said, if the US were to vote in that spot stain again, then they deserve what they get. Just unfair the rest of the world has to deal with it.

Considering they built a guillotine outside the Capitol for him, you'd think he would.

"It should be left to OUR people to decide."

That's what they mean. They know the people that vote for them will largely vote for a fucking Ham Sandwich if it has an R next to its name. So they know that they'll almost certainly never face consequences for anything so long as it's up to the people that vote for them. They can purge voter rolls, strategically close polling places, attack mail in voting. There tons of things they can do which will impact potential Democratic voters more than Republican voters.

Yeah, but Trump tried to kill him. I mean I know he has no integrity or shame, but to see it on this level still amazes me.

If your aim is to be the leader of the Republican ticket, your only option is to change Republican voters' minds about that.

There's no reason to run at all if you don't, since the current default Republican position is "he did nothing wrong and the election was stolen, so he deserves another shot at the presidency." You can't run against him and agree with all of those things.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think anyone's likely to change primary voters' minds about that, but it's the only logical strategy a non-Trump Republican could use to win.

That bit you do in the middle.

The cherry picking is their lifeblood.

Yes they will. And based on the past decade I find it really hard to predict what strategies will be winning strategies

given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof

Saying "We love you" on national TV about seditionists doesn't count as aid or comfort?

Gotta convict him first, unfortunately. You aren't disqualified merely for being accused of doing something, no matter how awful.

Just like the bible, only certain parts are treated as being meant literally

My theory: he's one of, if not the only people in the GOP capable of drawing enough votes to slow/stop the party's actions and record from catching up to it, and the party's sliding out of competition with the democrats...and the party leaders know it.

They don't like him either, but what they like even less is losing their own power, wealth, and prestige...so in the short term at least, Fat Orange Man is their go-to...until and unless an alternative emerges.

The party has tried a similar replacement in DeSantis and it hasn't worked, so it's back to Trump.

The overall direction of the country and the world has been more or less away from the ideals of that party for at least 25 years, and if not for 9/11 and Trump, they'd have been forced to at least make a show of keeping up with the times or be at risk of collapsing as a relevant political bloc.

Once the patriotic wave following 9/11 faded, the party found itself buoyed by the votes and support of a racist backlash to the election of a black president, and rather than choose to take the votes without shifting platform to cater to those voters, instead they slowly but surely steered the party in that direction, openly courting the most backward, hateful, and dogmatic among us.

Conveniently for them, the democratic party put up one of its least popular candidates even as they found a mouthpiece in Trump willing to and skilled at courting these voters and willing to double down on the bullshit he spouted.

Rather than try to distance the party from that nonsense, they've all jumped aboard, and Trump's personality has forced them all to swear loyalty...and now their only option seems to be to back him as long as he wants to play politician, no matter how bad it gets.

Personally, I'm hoping that a combination of multiple convictions and political losses for Trump over the next few years, combined with his eventual death sometime in the next decade, forces the GOP to either wholly reinvent itself, shifting towards/to the American "middle" (still right leaning by global standards), abandoning many of it's worst positions and becoming a more responsible and reasoned platform for conservatism...or that those combined effects cause the party to implode/fracture, finally giving America a chance to have more than two stable, long term, viable political parties.

It's a devils bargain the RNC made when they first championed this brain drain MAGA nonsense.

Now the field is flooded with candidates who can repeat these easy to remember, ultimately meaningless nationalism talking points and the RNC will be split.

Any type of split means the Dems will sweep. The Dems are gonna run one candidate, and it's the incumbent.

Not a Trump supporter but "people" as in normal people like us didn't really decide the constitution. A few people in a hot room who didn't want to be there did.

So, the first thing to remember about a conservative is that their beliefs aren't based on anything more than what they want. Conservatives build their ideology around their identity, not the other way around. It's certainly not based on rational thought or reality. A conservative decides what is good for them personally, and then looks for ideas and causes that support themselves.

To answer your question, Pence wants to remain relevant. Trump, like it or not, has a devoted following of die-hard supporters. Pence wants to be in the race long enough to have a crack at being the second choice should Trump's legal woes keep him off the ballot. What Pence says and what Pence believes are entirely unrelated.

Fwiw many people applaud Pence for not caving to the pressure from Trump to try to subvert the electoral process. I don't. Pence had neither the authority nor the will to make Trump the winner of the election. Pence did what was best for Pence, and had he attempted to interfere, he would have been equally unsuccessful and would now be considered a coconspirator. I doubt he imagined Trump would still have a loyal following, but that's just because I think Pence is also kind of stupid.

Politics is about perception. Trump voters perceive Pence as the guy who failed them. He wants people to perceive him as the responsible adult during the Trump administration, doing his duty as a Republican and as VP. He also wants donors to perceive him as an influential leader, so they keep giving him money. Of course none of those things are true, so for an outside observer trying to parse the logic of his situation, it's a bit of a play within a play within a bowl of vomit.

So a convicted felon can lose their right to vote, but they can still be President. Gottit.

Who can vote is a decision for each state (subject to various federal restrictions added over time, mostly in the form of Constitutional amendments), who can hold the office of President is determined by the Constitution.

Pence being a spineless coward aside, it depends on what he is convicted of. Trump has been charged with a lot of shit, and some of those charges would not disqualify him from the Presidency while others would.

I'd view that as Pence was on the right side of the coup? Maybe I'm reading that wrong.

He validated the votes and made sure the office was turned over to the person who won the election. He has shit views on most things, but he did the right thing on that day it seems.

spineless

So this is why he is not afraid of "Hang Mike Pence!" chants.

Your highschool government class should have covered this. A pure popular vote system is essentially mob rule, and mobs are fucking idiots. The idea is that you vote people into office that are smart, that are trained, that are the best of us.

Recent studies have revealed that republicans never had spines to begin with. They have more DNA in common with worms than any other creature.

That's true, it won't, but the opportunities for solving the root problem(s) are much less with said convicted criminal in power than they are with him in prison.

The 14th amendment disqualifies him. Prison is irrelevant, but the constitution is just as irrelevant when it is just selectively ignored for convenience.

It would be because of prison; it would be because of leading an insurrection. These aren't even close to the same.

It might be funny but it also makes perfect sense.

Trump is the defacto face of the party now, win or lose, so anyone who wants to take his place on the ballot in 24 has to walk the impossible tightrope of being different enough from him to get moderate Republicans to vote for them in the primary, while also being enough like him to somehow get loyal trump voters to vote for them instead of him.

It can't be done.

It'd be very different if Trump were out of the picture (not running, term limited, convicted and in prison for insurrection, or dead) and the primary field didn't include the OG responsible for the way the party looks and acts now.

In that scenario, you have a field not including trump, with everyone trying their own blend of trump republicanism, traditional conservatism, and whatever else made them unique in the field. But instead, as long as he's in the discussion, they have to somehow be more popular than the party figurehead, and find ways to be different from him while not criticizing anything he says or does, or risk immediately setting his entire base against them.

Their complacency and servitude is bizarre. I struggle to believe they'd just publicly demean themselves over and over again without being blackmailed or threatened but it looks like humiliation rolls off them like water from a ducks back.