Replacing Donald Trump? Mike Pence Begins Presidential Campaign “Unofficially”
By Eric Zuesse
Global Research
May 19, 2017
On Wednesday, May 17th, U.S. Vice President Mike Pence, who has built his political career as both a fundamentalist Christian, and a client of the libertarian Koch brothers’ extensive fundraising network, made his unofficial but starting bid to become the U.S. President: he formed an organization to raise funds from billionaires and centi-millionaires, in order for Pence to be able to distribute those wealthy investors’ funds to Republican politicians (especially to ones in the U.S. Senate and House) whom Pence favors, and who might reasonably then be expected to return that favor by their supporting a Pence bid to become the U.S. President. Of course, the Presidency is the only American political office that’s higher than Pence’s current one, the Vice Presidency.
This type of organization is called a “leadership PAC,” and the donors to it are thereby entrusting to the politician who has formed it, that politician’s ability and power to serve as the given donor’s agent to select other politicians to become agents of that given donor — Pence is thus becoming a financial middle-man, to control the distribution of those donors’ cash.
As Bill Allison of Bloomberg News headlined this action by Pence, on May 17th, “Pence Takes Steps to Build War Chest as White House Stumbles”. That report opened:
Political action committee registered Wednesday with FEC
Neither Biden nor Cheney had active leadership PACs in office
While President Donald Trump’s White House grapples with the fallout from his firing of the former FBI director, Vice President Mike Pence has taken steps to begin building his own political war chest.
Pence launched Great America Committee, a leadership PAC, a move that will enable him to channel money to congressional Republicans ahead of the 2018 midterm elections. The political action committee’s registration was posted Wednesday on the Federal Election Commission website.
There are only two ways in which Pence can replace the current U.S. President, Donald Trump, while Trump is serving his four-year elected term in that office:
The well-known method is by the sitting President’s becoming impeached by 50%+1 members of the U.S. House of Representatives, and then actually removed from office by a subsequent two-thirds vote of the members of the U.S. Senate. Of course, Mr. Pence would be helped in this method if some of those members of Congress are partially relying upon Mr. Pence in order to be financially able to retain, or else to become advanced from — such as to become a Cabinet member in a President Pence’s Administration — their current office.
The less well-known method is yet more subject to being influenced by the existing holder of the office of the U.S. Vice President; and this is Section 4 of The 25th Amendment, which starts with:
Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments [i.e., the Cabinet members] or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.
The Rest…HERE
