(VitalNews.org) – Former Vice-President Mike Pence has entered the 2024 presidential race on the Republican side, and he’s going after his former running mate.
Pence, who served as Vice President with Donald Trump from 2016 to 2020 announced his plan to run for President on June 6th.
Pence is pulling no punches about his views about Trump, characterizing him as abandoning conservative principles and the Constitution. Pence said Trump tried to compel him to stop the electoral count during the 2020 Presidential election, which Pence refused to do. Pence ultimately certified the results of the race.
Speaking to a crowd in the politically important state of Iowa, Pence said Trump’s views on a number of issues were not compatible with what Pence says are traditional conservative values. The hottest of these issues, unsurprisingly, is abortion.
“The sanctity of life” has been a staunch principle of the Republican Party for 50 years, Pence said, and long before Donald Trump became a Republican. But the 45th president treats unborn babies as “an inconvenience,” Pence said, and Trump blames Republicans’ poor showing in the 2022 midterms on the Supreme Court’s 2022 overturning of Roe vs Wade.
Roe vs Wade was a Supreme Court decision in 1973 that prevented US states from banning abortion in the first three months and set up a trimester schedule by which states could enact further restrictions. When the Supreme Court overturned Roe in 2022, the right to regulate abortion returned entirely to the individual states.
Pence agrees with Trump critics from the left side of the aisle who believe that Trump is responsible for the vandalism and riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, 2021. He said no president who “put himself above the Constitution”, and who asked his running mate to violate the Constitution, should be allowed to serve as president again.
So far, Pence is facing his former running mate, Trump, Florida Republican Governor Ron DeSantis, former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, Republican Senator Tim Scott, and others competing for the Republican nomination.
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