Trump pressed Pence to disrupt the count, but Pence said no

Donald Trump spent January 6 trying to get Vice President Mike Pence to interfere with the congressional count of electoral votes. The pressure was part of a larger effort to stop Joe Biden’s victory from being certified. But the Constitution and the Electoral Count Act did not give Pence the power Trump wanted him to use. The joint session of Congress was set to meet that afternoon to count the electoral votes already certified by the states. congress.gov Pence had already made the legal problem plain. In a January 5 letter to Congress, he said he had no unilateral authority to determine which electoral votes should be counted. The next day, as the joint session began, he presided over the proceedings under the rules laid out by Congress. That was the central fact Trump was trying to ignore: the vice president’s role was to open and announce the electoral certificates, not rewrite the outcome. govinfo.gov Trump kept pushing anyway. His allies and supporters amplified the idea that Pence could somehow block the count, even though the governing procedure did not allow that. The official record of the joint session shows Pence acting as presiding officer while members of Congress followed the objection process written into law. The objections were debated and rejected. The count continued. congress.gov The bigger damage that day came from Trump’s attempt to turn a routine constitutional step into a test of personal loyalty. By putting Pence in the line of fire, Trump tried to turn the vice presidency into a tool for reversing an election. Pence refused to do it, and the refusal exposed how little lawful support Trump’s plan actually had. The effort did not fail because Pence invented a crisis by standing firm. It failed because Trump was asking for a power the vice president did not have. govinfo.gov That was the story of January 6: a president who pressed for an outcome the law did not permit, a vice president who said so publicly and proceeded with the count, and a Congress that kept the process moving even as the Capitol itself came under attack. The pressure on Pence did not create the constitutional rules of the day. It ran into them. congress.gov