Politics

The Myth Of Mike Pence

by ThinkProgress

CREDIT:

In this May 11, 2016, file photo, Indiana Gov. Mike Pence launches his campaign for re-election during an event in Indianapolis. Pence will meet with presumed Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump over the weekend, a top aide to the governor said Friday, July 1, 2016, after it was confirmed that Pence is under consideration as a vice presidential running-mate. (AP Photo/Michael Conroy, File)

After months pitching himself to GOP voters as an outsider who understands how to manipulate political insiders, Donald Trump is expected to officially chose a career politician Mike Pence for a running mate on Friday.

Mike Pence was 29 when he first ran for high office. Now the Governor of Indiana, Pence was a fresh-faced lawyer with ambitions for government work when he lost to then-Rep. Phil Sharp (D). He tried and failed again in 1990 – this time relying on his campaign fundraising to pay rent and buy food after quitting his job to work the trail full-time – and then bounced between a policy think-tank and a local talk-radio gig before returning to electoral politics in 1999.

In his six consecutive terms in Congress, Pence grew from a backbencher at the start of the Bush years to a powerhouse within the leadership of the GOP caucus. Staunch support for the invasion of Iraq and adamant defenses of the intelligence that led the country to war there aided his rise. Once in power, he played for broke on hardline social conservative policies, helped lead the Republican effort to stymie progress in President Obama’s first term, and then went home to lead Indiana in much the same style.

While Pence is viewed as a “safe” and “conventional” choice that will help rally the Republican establishment to Trump, his actual record is far more extreme and controversial.

Pence: “Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn’t kill.”

On his campaign site in 2000, Pence wrote that smoking “doesn’t kill” and concerns about the lethal impact of smoking were a product of “hysteria from the political class and the media.”

Time for a quick reality check. Despite the hysteria from the political class and the media, smoking doesn’t kill. In fact, 2 out of every three smokers does not die from a smoking related illness and 9 out of ten smokers do not contract lung cancer.

Pence said that the real danger to the public was not cigarettes but “back-handed big government disguised in do-gooder healthcare rhetoric.”

Pence refused to say whether he believed in evolution.

In a 2009 interview, Pence was asked by Chris Matthews on MSNBC if he believed in evolution. He said that he embraced “the view that God created the Heavens and the Earth, the Seas and all that’s in them. The means that he used to do that, I can’t say, but I do believe in that fundamental truth.”

Pushed by Matthews on whether he had taken a biology class in high school, Pence attacked Matthews saying “This anti-science thing is a little bit weak.”

Pence called for draconian penalities for low-level drug offenses, argued prisoners be required to pay the costs of their incarceration.

While other legislators around the country started to ease tough drug sentences, Pence pushed for draconian marijuana penalties as governor in 2013, explicitly raising the concern that low-level drug offenders were not facing sufficient punishment. This year, he signed into law new mandatory minimums for certain kinds of drug use and distribution. As he’s overseen these harsh sentencing initiatives, he’s raked in cash from the private prison lobby (), particularly from GEO Group, which operates a prison in Indiana and was one of the biggest donors to Pence’s campaigns. But Pence’s penchant for private prisons started decades ago, when he ran a think tank in the 1990s that called for prisons to be privatized and suggested that inmates be required to work to pay for the costs of their own incarceration.

Pence pioneered a legislative sleight-of-hand using the principles of religious liberty to discriminate against LGBT people.

Last year, the governor signed into law the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which gave businesses, employees, and even healthcare providers the green light to refuse service to LGBT people, if they felt their lifestyles were against their religious beliefs. In response to criticism, Pence introduced a revised version that included new language to clarify that businesses and service providers could not use the legislation as a justification to discriminate based on a client’s sexual orientation.


Pence was a leading purveyor of misinformation about the Iraq War.

In a September 2002 CNN appearance, Pence called for a formal declaration of war on Iraq and asserted that Saddam Hussein’s regime was supporting al Qaeda. Three days later on the network, he said “there’s overwhelming evidence…circumstantial and otherwise to suggest a connection between Iraq and al Qaeda.” In an editorial board interview with the local Palladium-Item in Richmond, IN that month, he went further. “There is an enormous amount of evidence that Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, is doing his best to develop more lethal weapons, and funds and supports terrorism,” Pence, then in his first term, said.

Less than a year later Pence’s conviction that Hussein had WMD was exposed as a sham. But the freshly re-elected congressman rejected calls to investigate what had gone wrong with the Bush administration’s case for war. “It might be enough for you [to want an inquiry], but I’d rather put my confidence in the overwhelming evidence of over a decade,” he told a CNN host. “It really defies logic and common sense and the overwhelming consensus of the intelligence community of the western world to suggest that a weapons program, weapons of mass destruction was not present in Iraq leading all the way up to Operation Iraqi Freedom.”

As the bloody, chaotic, destabilizing aftermath of Operation Iraqi Freedom became obvious, Pence kicked his denialism into high gear. Returning from a visit to Iraq that included a visit to a downtown market in Baghdad, Pence wrote, “I told reporters afterward that it was just like any open-air market in Indiana in the summertime.”

Pence went to extreme lengths to pursue a vendetta against Planned Parenthood.

Pence made particular hay out of a series of hoax videos purporting to show that Planned Parenthood staffers knowingly aided a pimp. The supposed sting was thoroughly and rapidly debunked as a heavily edited smear of the organization. But Pence bit down hard, using the boomlet of news coverage of the videos to justify legislation to defund Planned Parenthood during official House proceedings.

He was fond of attacking the organization as “Big Abortion,” smearing the women’s health services organization as some sort of industrial profit-seeker.

And his commitment to the cause went beyond mere rhetoric. While Republicans wouldn’t actually manage to shut the government down over Planned Parenthood funding and abortion policy until 2013, Pence pioneered the idea in 2011 and brought the government within 11 hours of lights-out over his adamance about the group – which, again, stemmed from totally fake videos that had already been rapidly disproven.

Pence called global warming a “myth,” said the world is cooler now than it was 50 years ago.

In 2001, Pence openly mocked climate science calling it a “myth.” In global warming, Pence wrote, “the environmental movement has found a new chant for their latest ‘chicken little’ attempt to raise taxes and grow centralized governmental power.” Pence falsely claimed that “the earth is actually cooler today than it was about 50 years ago” and “most climatologists agree that, at best, global warming is a theory about future climactic conditions and cannot be proven based upon the historic record.” He also said that greenhouse gases “are mostly the result of volcanoes, hurricanes and underwater geologic displacements.”

Pence tried to create a state-controlled media outlet in Indiana.

In an aim to “streamline” the dispersal of news from state agencies, Pence announced his own news service, dubbed “Just IN”, in January 2015. The state-run, taxpayer-funded news outlet would have dispersed pre-written news stories available to Indiana media as well as breaking news about the Pence administration to other outlets. The plan was largely discredited by the public and was compared with the state-controlled media associated with communist countries. It never came to fruition.


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