The former VP indicates his decision about running for president in 2024 won’t depend on whether Trump seeks another term.
The former VP indicates his decision about running for president in 2024 won’t depend on whether Trump seeks another term.
W hile many Republicans have ruled out a 2024 presidential campaign if former president Donald Trump seeks the GOP nomination again, former vice president Mike Pence won’t do the same.
When asked on Tuesday if his decision about 2024 would depend on Trump’s decision, Pence told National Review: “We’ll go where we’re called.”
Pence indicated that he will wait until 2023 to make up his mind. “One hundred percent of our focus right now is on the midterm elections,” he says. “We can have a historic election in 2022, and then in 2023 we’ll look around. We’ll go where we’re called.”
“That’s been the anthem of my life,” says Pence, referring to callings he felt, and that his wife shared, that he should run for Congress and governor of Indiana and later to accept the vice-presidential nomination. “I can assure you that come 2023, we’ll reflect, we’ll pray, and we’ll go where we’re called.”
Pence briefly spoke to National Review following his speech at the National Press Club, where he defended Mississippi’s 15-week limit on abortion — the law that’s at the heart of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the case coming before the Supreme Court on Wednesday. He urged the Court to overturn Roe and restore the ability of states to enact abortion laws.
Asked by NR after the speech if the Court’s failure to overturn Roe would require future Republican presidents to change the way they vet and select Supreme Court nominees, Pence was typically circumspect: “We’ll see.”
“President Trump asked me to spend time with all the nominees, all the finalists,” Pence added. “Justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett — they are men and women of integrity and conviction. And I remain very hopeful that that would be reflected in the decision.”
Pence predicted in his speech that the Supreme Court would overturn Roe “either now or in the near future.”
“When you have four justices that took this case and you have a solid conservative majority on the Court, I think the greatest likelihood is that the days of Roe v. Wade are numbered,” Pence tells NR.
When asked how pro-life conservatives would respond to an adverse ruling, Pence said it would “simply steel their resolve,” but he thinks that such a decision is unlikely. Other high-ranking former GOP officials have warned that letting Roe stand would deeply harm the judiciary. Ed Meese, who served as attorney general under President Reagan, wrote in a Washington Post op-ed on Tuesday that, if the Court fails to overturn Roe, then the “next generation of law students would fairly ask whether it is worth standing for neutral interpretive principles when most of a court purportedly committed to them will, when the stakes are sufficiently high, set them aside. These law students will be tempted, understandably so, to abandon this philosophy in favor of a purely results-oriented approach to judging.”
Asked a second time if failure to overturn Roe would demoralize conservatives and destroy the movement promoting their legal philosophy, Pence replied: “Again, it’s an interesting question, but I don’t believe in my heart that we’ll have to answer that.”