Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida refused to answer whether he believes Donald Trump was wrong to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to reject the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, pointing instead to the prospect of the former president’s potential 2024 campaign.
The senator told Face The Nation on CBS on Sunday that “vice presidents can’t simply decide not to certify an election”, breaking from the former president’s baseless assertion that Mr Pence “could have overturned” the results of the election during a joint session of Congress to certify the results.
When pressed by host Margaret Brennan whether he agrees with Mr Pence saying that he had “no right to overturn the election”, Mr Rubio reiterated that he doesn’t believe vice presidents can do so.
“If President Trump runs for re-election, I believe he would defeat Joe Biden, and I don’t want Kamala Harris to have the power as vice president to overturn that election, and I don’t – that’s the same thing I concluded back in January of 2021,” he said.
Ms Brennan replied: “So Donald Trump was wrong?”
“Well, as I said, I just don’t think the vice president has that power, because if the vice president has that power, Donald Trump would defeat Joe Biden in four years, two years, and Kamala Harris can decide not – to overturn the election,” Mr Rubio said. “I don’t want to wind up there.”
The former vice president’s remarks to a Federalist Society event on Friday came just hours after the Republican Party voted to censure to Republican members of Congress for participating in the House select committee investigation into the pro-Trump mob’s attack on the US Capitol on 6 January.
The GOP censured US Reps Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for the “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”
During the attack, Mr Trump wrote on Twitter that his vice president “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution”.
“The presidency belongs to the American people, and the American people alone,” Mr Pence said on Friday. “Frankly, there is almost no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president.”
He added: “Under the Constitution, I had no right to change the outcome of our election. And Kamala Harris will have no right to overturn the election when we beat them in 2024.”
The events of 6 January and baseless allegations of voter fraud and manipulation have exposed a rift in the GOP as Congress prepares to make critical changes to the Electoral Count Act, a confusingly worded 19th century law that outlines the process for the peaceful transfer of power, in the hopes of avoiding a similar crisis.
Mr Trump’s allies weaponised the law’s ambiguities to promote theories giving the vice president unilateral power to reject election outcomes and to subvert the results by allowing states to send conflicting slates of electors to Congress in the hopes of rejecting votes for Joe Biden to seat Mr Trump for a second term.
A bipartisan group of Senators are reviewing changes to the law to make it more difficult to challenge results and explicitly clarify that the vice president cannot toss out the results.
