INDIANAPOLIS — Some 40 frightened travelers and crew had been forced to the back of the airliner on a brilliant September morning in 2001. The Flight 93 hijackers were barreling toward the U.S. Capitol just minutes after the assaults on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
And these 40 people then did the most American thing: They voted. They decided to storm the cockpit to save the U.S. Capitol, at the cost of their own lives.
About 600 miles and 18 minutes away from that doomed airliner stood a freshman Indiana congressman named Mike Pence.
Pence felt anger pumping adrenaline through his veins as F-16s crisscrossed the sky over the U.S. Capitol seeking that rogue airliner. He defied a Capitol police order to evacuate. “I couldn’t walk away from the moment,” Pence thought as smoke billowed nearby from the Pentagon. “I had to report to duty. It was like standing on the shore of Pearl Harbor.”
Hundreds if not thousands of crucial votes have been cast in America, going back to July 2, 1776, when the Continental Congress debated the Declaration of Independence during a raging thunderstorm before its unanimous vote.
A 2008 senate race in Minnesota was decided by fewer than 400 votes, but Democrat Al Franken’s victory paved the way for Senate passage of Obamacare. Mitch McConnell won a Kentucky Senate seat in 1984 by less than 1%, a result that forever reshaped the upper chamber and the U.S. Supreme Court. That same year, Democrat Frank McCloskey won Indiana’s “Bloody 8th” Congressional District by a mere four votes.
Razor-thin votes have happened in the Indiana General Assembly. Lt. Gov. Richard O. Ristine’s tie-breaking vote gave the state its first income tax in 1963. Sen. Charles Bosma saved Gov. Doc Bowen’s tax reforms a decade later. Reps. Jackie Walorski and Troy Woodruff provided the scant margins for Gov. Mitch Daniels’ Major Moves transportation plan and daylight saving time.
In the 2000 presidential election, Florida was decided by fewer than 600 votes after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling. The loser of that race, Vice President Al Gore, presided at the Electoral College certification on Jan. 6, 2001, for the man who defeated him, George W. Bush. It was one of the first congressional proceedings attended by the freshman Rep. Mike Pence. Gore urged citizens to unite behind “our next president,” adding, “This is America.”
Americans settle things … by voting.
Twenty years later, Vice President Pence would play a similar fateful role.
Except, this time in 2021, President Donald Trump tried to steal the election. In an unsealed federal court filing in the District of Columbia, Special Counsel Jack Smith laid out Trump’s alleged crimes.
“When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office,” the motion argued. “With private co-conspirators, the defendant launched a series of increasingly desperate plans to overturn the legitimate election results. The throughline of these efforts was deceit.”
Trump planned to declare victory even before the election, the filing repeatedly alleged. During the virtual Republican National Convention in his nomination acceptance speech in August 2020, Trump said, “The only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election.”
“It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election,” one witness reported Trump telling family members. “You still have to fight like hell.”
It would be Vice President Pence, the former Indiana governor, who would end up in President Trump’s crosshairs after dozens of White House staffers, campaign aides and supporters had told the president that he didn’t win and that fraud wasn’t the reason. Pence had “gradually and gently” tried to persuade Trump to accept the results.
When it became obvious that Pence would not go along with the scheme, Trump told him that “hundreds of thousands” of people “are gonna hate your guts.” As Trump’s mob broke in and ransacked the U.S. Capitol, attacking 140 police officers, many chanted, “Hang Mike Pence!”
When an aide told Trump that security measures were being taken to protect Pence from the mob, the president “looked at him and said only, ‘So what?’” the filing alleged.
With Pence, his wife, daughter and congressman brother facing the mob, our president said, “So what?”
In essence, Vice President Pence stood in this political breach and protected the 155 million Americans who voted in that election, with 81.2 million voting to elect Joe Biden and 74.2 million for Trump. If Vice President Pence had caved to Trump’s scheme, those 155 million votes could have been wiped out and his name would have joined “quisling” as a noun of ill repute.
An exhaustive Associated Press investigation in 2021 found fewer than 475 instances of confirmed voter fraud across six battleground states — nowhere near the magnitude required to sway the outcome of the presidential election. Asked at last week’s gubernatorial debate if he believed President Biden was elected in 2020, U.S. Sen. Mike Braun answered, “I do.”
As for Trump’s “So what?” while his vice president and family were in peril, this is an absolutely disqualifying response. Mike Pence was our governor; Karen Pence was our first lady. They had been unfailingly loyal to President Trump until Jan. 6, 2021. And at our collective moment of constitutional peril that could pervert American democracy, all President Trump could say was, “So what?”
Howey is a senior reporter and columnist for State Affairs/Howey Politics Indiana. Find him on X @hwypol.
