Ahead of tonight’s vice presidential debate, Correct The Record released a new memo and video outlining what you need to know about the extreme record of Mike Pence, Donald Trump’s running mate and chief apologist. For years, Pence has been at the forefront of right-wing attacks on women, LGBT Americans, immigrants and refugees in Congress and Indiana. Since joining the Republican ticket, Pence has taken his extremist politics national as the chief defender and explainer of Trump’s hateful rhetoric and bigoted views.
MEMORANDUM
TO: Interested Parties
FROM: Brad Woodhouse, President of Correct The Record
RE: What You Need to Know About Donald Trump’s Chief Apologist, Mike Pence
DATE: October 4, 2016
Compared to the bombastic Donald Trump, many have painted vice presidential nominee Mike Pence as the voice of reason on the Republican ticket. In reality, Indiana Governor Mike Pence is as extreme as Republicans come and has emerged as the GOP’s leading apologist for Trump’s most outrageous comments and policies.
For years, Pence has been at the forefront of right-wing attacks on women’s health, LGBT rights and immigrants and refugees in both Washington and Indiana. So it is no surprise that since signing up for the Donald Trump campaign, Pence himself has emerged as the the chief defender and explainer of Trump’s hateful politics. Ahead of tonight’s vice presidential debate, here is what you need to know about the other half of the Republican ticket.
Cleaning up for Donald Trump
For someone who claims to be “a Christian, a conservative, and a Republican, in that order,” Pence has inexplicably defended Donald Trump’s offensive rhetoric and behavior at every turn. Pence has proven a remarkable willingness to try to dismiss, explain, or otherwise condone offensive statements and policies from his running mate and the Trump family. In the process, he has become an apologist for some of Trump’s ugliest and most poisonous rhetoric—including Birtherism, Trump’s insinuation of violence against Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump Jr.’s infamous Skittles tweet.
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MACHADO: Ignoring the blatantly offensive nature of Trump’s comments, Pence brushed off Donald Trump’s body shaming and incendiary tweets about a “sex tape” (that doesn’t exist) regarding former Miss Universe Alicia Machado as the media being too focused on “he said this, he tweeted that.”
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RUSSIA: On Trump’s dangerous admiration of Putin’s Russia, Pence offered the head-shaking assertion that it was “inarguable” that Putin has been a stronger leader than President Obama and compared Trump’s encouragement of Russia to hack Hillary Clinton’s emails to an Abraham Lincoln quote.
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BIRTHERISM: Governor Pence defended Trump’s leading role in the birther conspiracy theory, saying Trump “brought that issue to an end this week” after Trump’s one-sentence admission and, in the same week, Trump refused to admit President Obama was born in Hawaii.
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OBAMA FOUNDED ISIS: Pence has defended Trump’s assertion that Obama founded ISIS and Trump’s support for bringing back waterboarding, saying–without proof–“enhanced interrogation saved lives.”
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ENCOURAGING VIOLENCE: Pence has tried to explain away Trump’s insinuation of violence against Clinton with his comment that “Second Amendment people” could do something about Clinton picking judges and Clinton’s secret service protection should disarm and “see what happens to her.”
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POLICE POLICIES AND GUN VIOLENCE: Pence defended Trump’s call for profiling, calling it “common sense,” claimed Trump is “on a sound constitutional footing” with his stop-and-frisk proposal (not true), and defended Trump for politicizing the shooting death of NBA player Dwyane Wade’s cousin.
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SKITTLES: He defended Donald Trump Jr.’s tweet comparing Syrian refugees to poisoned Skittles, saying he was simply using a “metaphor” and condescendingly said it was “remarkable to see the level of outrage” about the tweet.
“Nobody hates Planned Parenthood quite as much as Mike Pence.”
While Trump continues to make headlines for his disparaging, offensive comments about women, Mike Pence’s record expands upon this disrespect for women. Perhaps more than any other Republican politician in the recent past, Pence has fought to undermine women’s access to health care services on both the national level and in Indiana. In 2011, Politico even declared that “Nobody hates Planned Parenthood quite as much as Mike Pence.”
Pence has a long history of trying to take down Planned Parenthood in his larger campaign to take away a woman’s right to choose. He has said he wants to send Roe v. Wade “to the ash heap of history where it belongs.” Pence signed into Indiana law earlier this year a bill that would ban women from seeking abortion based on a fetal diagnosis of physical or mental disability and require women to seek funerary services for a fetus, no matter if an abortion or miscarriage, at any point in time in the pregnancy. The law was blocked by a federal judge in June 2016.
In Congress, Pence was the defacto leader of efforts to defund Planned Parenthood and eliminate the Title X program, which provides family planning and reproductive health funding. In 2011, Politico wrote Mike Pence was “on a one-man crusade to deny all federal funding to [Planned Parenthood]—not just the money it gets for reproductive health and family planning services, but every penny it gets for anything.” He sponsored legislation that would make it legal for hospitals to deny abortions to pregnant women with life-threatening conditions and supported a federal ban on abortions after 20 weeks. He cosponsored a bill that would redefine certain rape cases as “forcible rape,” redefining “rape” in the case of federal funding for abortions in case of “forcible” rape only.
Enacting LGBT discrimination in the name of “religious freedom”
Donald Trump’s repeated refrain to the religious right is a promise that he will protect religious freedom by repealing the Johnson Amendment. His running mate is right in line with Trump’s extreme agenda, having already taking action in the name of “religious freedom” in 2015. Governor Mike Pence signed into law the Religious Freedom Restoration Act in 2015 and with it, exacted LGBT discrimination. The widely-condemned law alienated the Republican governor’s natural allies in the business community, drew national condemnation and deeply embarrassed the Hoosier state. Throughout the scandal, Pence displayed an almost Trump-like level of disingenuousness and dishonesty. In one devastating interview with ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos, Pence refused to answer six yes-or-no questions about whether the law legalized discrimination against the LGBT community.
Pence at first said he would not support legislation to clean up the mess he made, was “knowingly disingenuous” when trying to compare Indiana’s law to those passed in other states, and finally supported a bill to “clarify” RFRA after an uproar from Indiana business and community leaders and other governors and mayors banned taxpayer-funded travel to Indiana.
Discriminating against the LGBT community was nothing new for Governor Pence. When in Congress, he cosponsored an amendment to the Constitution that would ban same-sex marriage, voted against the Employment Non-Discrimination Act and against the Matthew Shepard Act in 2007 and 2009. During his first successful run for Congress in 2000, his campaign said “Homosexuality is incompatible with military service because the presence of homosexuals in the ranks weakens unit cohesion.”
Test driving Trump’s Muslim ban in Indiana
It’s no surprise Pence is “very supportive” of Trump’s proposed ban of Muslims from coming to the U.S. In 2015, Governor Pence announced he was suspending the resettlement of all Syrian refugees in Indiana. Religious leaders defied the Governor. The Archbishop of Indianapolis, Joseph Tobin, met with the Pence to hear his concerns but defied his ban, declaring Catholic Charities would welcome a family of four from Syria anyway. This ban was challenged in court by the ACLU and blocked by a federal judge on the grounds that it “clearly discriminates” against Syrian refugees.
Pence honed his anti-immigrant agenda while serving in Congress. He said it was “wrong” to oppose Arizona’s “papers, please” immigration law, sponsored legislation that would end birthright citizenship, opposed a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, and sponsored a bill to declare English the official language of the United States. He even introduced an immigration plan that would push undocumented immigrants to “self-deport.”
BONUS: Bringing Pravda to the Plains
Trump disparages members of the media nearly every day, whether through going after certain newspapers or networks or encouraging rally attendees to boo reporters covering his events. This concerning lack of respect for a free and open press is something Governor Pence can relate to. In 2015, Governor Pence tried to launch a state-run news service in Indiana that earned the nickname “Pravda on the Plains.” His state-run taxpayer-funded news outlet was going to produce pre-written news stories and even break news about the Pence administration. Not surprisingly, Pence was forced to drop the project after planning documents were leaked to the Indianapolis Star.