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WASHINGTON When an alarmed Representative Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader, called the White House on Jan. 6, 2021, demanding to know why the president of the United States had suggested he was coming to the Capitol while Congress met to certify his election defeat, the person on the other end of the line had just turned 25 years old.

I said, Ill run the traps on this, Cassidy Hutchinson, now 26, testified this week before the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, recalling what she had told Mr. McCarthy, Republican of California. I can assure you, were not coming to the Capitol.

Ms. Hutchinsons two hours of testimony provided a riveting account of President Donald J. Trumps mind-set and actions the day of the mob attack and situated the young aide an assistant by title, but a gatekeeper in practice at the very center of some of the most sensitive conversations and events of that day.

It also pulled back the curtain on a little-acknowledged truth about how Washington works: The capitals power centers may be helmed largely by the geriatric set, but they are fueled by recent college graduates, often with little to no previous job experience beyond an internship. And while many of those young players rank low on the official food chain, their proximity to the pinnacle of power gives them disproportionate influence, and a front-row seat to critical moments that can define the country.

Sometimes, the interns themselves appear to be running the show.

After the House investigative committee accused Senator Ron Johnson, Republican of Wisconsin, of attempting to hand-deliver to Vice President Mike Pence a slate of false electoral votes for Mr. Trump, Mr. Johnson, 67, blamed the incident on a young underling. He claimed that an unidentified House intern had instructed his staff to give the list of fake electors to Mr. Pence.

Other former Trump aides who have appeared in video testimony during the Jan. 6 hearings include Nick Luna, now 35, Mr. Trumps former body man; Sarah Matthews, now 27, a former deputy White House press secretary; and Ben Williamson, now 29, like Ms. Hutchinson a former aide to Mark Meadows, the final Trump White House chief of staff.

The committee has also featured some of its own young-looking investigators in videos laying out its work.

The relative youth of critical players wielding sway in the government is not a new phenomenon.

Lawrence Higby, who served as a top aide to H.R. Haldeman, President Richard M. Nixons chief of staff, was 25 years old when he testified as a key witness during the Watergate hearings.

President Lyndon B. Johnsons final chief of staff, James R. Jones, was 28 years old when he was appointed to the top job in the White House.

In an interview, Mr. Jones said he was able to rise so high so quickly by following the advice he had received from his boss, W. Marvin Watson, when he joined the White House staff at the ripe old age of 25.

What I was doing was passing his notes to the president, and he said, Youll be noticed at the right time. Just do your work now and stay out of the presidents view.

Mr. Jones added, You just had to be at the right place at the right time. I played very low key, I tried to give the credit of successes to others, I didnt talk to reporters thats how I think I made it. I probably would have made a number of key decisions differently with more years on me.

For the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 assault, relying on junior aides like Ms. Hutchinson who held internships with Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana and then at the White House before joining Mr. Trumps staff has been a crucial part of its strategy. With many of Mr. Trumps senior advisers refusing to cooperate, investigators moved down the organizational chart and quietly turned to at least half a dozen lower-level former staff members who provided critical information about their bosses activities.

We are definitely taking advantage of the fact that most senior-level people in Washington depend on a lot of young associates and subordinates to get anything done, Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, told Politico last month, claiming that the young people still have their ethics intact.

Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming and the vice chairwoman of the committee, compared Ms. Hutchinson favorably to the more seasoned officials who have stonewalled the panel.

Her superiors men many years older a number of them are hiding behind executive privilege, anonymity and intimidation, Ms. Cheney said in a speech this week. (Her father, the former vice president Dick Cheney, became deputy chief of staff in President Gerald R. Fords White House at the age of 33.)

John Podesta, a former chief of staff to President Bill Clinton and a former senior adviser to President Barack Obama, said it has always been the case that in the White House, there are a lot of people in their late 20s and early 30s coming from campaigns or from Capitol Hill for jobs with considerable responsibilities.

Theyre expected to perform with fealty to the institution and the Constitution, Mr. Podesta said. In this case, it seems like the younger people did a better job than the older people on that front.

They also have longer careers ahead of them, perhaps making them less willing to tie themselves forever to Mr. Trumps efforts to overturn the election.

For ambitious young people, government jobs in Washington have long offered a jet-fueled rise to power that the private sector, however lucrative, cant compete with.

You can get a better job as a 24-year-old in Washington in government than you can in a big company, said Steve Elmendorf, a well-connected Washington lobbyist who early in his career worked as a senior adviser to Representative Richard Gephardt, the Democratic leader. The West Wing is physically so small, the person who is the 24-year-old is sitting right on top of the principals. Young people end up getting a lot of responsibility, because the principals are so busy and so hard to get to.

That makes the assistants into gatekeepers who become players in their own right.

If you cant figure out how to get Ron Klain on the phone, he said, referring to President Bidens chief of staff, figure out the three people who sit outside his office.

Adding to the post-collegiate feel of Capitol Hill and the West Wing is the issue of who can afford to work in government, and for how long.

The average age of a House staffer is 31, according to the Sunlight Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to transparency in government, which noted in a report that the wage gap between the private and public sector may encourage staff to seek greener pastures while depriving Congress of experience and expertise.

A chief of staff on average would earn 40 percent more in the private sector than on Capitol Hill, according to the report, and ex-staffers who become lobbyists can increase their earnings by many multiples.

During her time in the Trump administration, Ms. Hutchinson, whose title was special assistant to the president for legislative affairs, earned $72,700, according to White House records. The most senior officials earned up to $180,000.

Still, she was there in the West Wing to witness the ketchup-dripping aftermath when Mr. Trump is said to have thrown his lunch against the wall in a rage that William P. Barr, the attorney general, had said publicly that there had been no widespread fraud in the 2020 election.

It was Ms. Hutchinson to whom the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, turned with a dire warning about what would happen if Mr. Trump followed through with his plan to follow his supporters to the Capitol on Jan. 6. Were going to get charged with every crime imaginable, Ms. Hutchinson said Mr. Cipollone told her.

And Mr. Meadows, who was said to have brought Ms. Hutchinson to virtually every meeting he attended, and Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trumps personal lawyer, addressed her familiarly as Cass as they spoke freely to her about what they were anticipating on Jan. 6.

As she leaned against the doorway to his office a few days before, she testified, Mr. Meadows confided to Ms. Hutchinson, Things might get real, real bad on Jan. 6.

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The 20-Somethings Who Help the 70-Somethings Run Washington - The New York Times

President Ronald Reagan began his first inaugural address in 1981 by reminding us thatthe orderly transfer of authority as called for in the Constitution routinely takes place, as it has for almost two centuries, and few of us stop to think how unique we really are.In the eyes of many in the world, this every four-year ceremony we accept as normal is nothing less than a miracle.

Obviously, the miracle was severely tested on Jan. 6-7, 2021.Joe Biden was only certified as the winner of the 2020 presidential election, you will recall, after a day and night of chaos and violence at the U.S. Capitol.Rioters erected makeshift gallows and chanted hang Mike Pence as others flooded the halls of Congress in search of the vice president, NPR reported, to thwart the peaceful transfer of power that has been a hallmark of modern American history.

That dark day, as Pence later called it, marked the second time in the 21st century that a vice president, while presiding over the tallying of electoral votes, had to quell efforts to overturn the results of a tumultuous presidential election.

In 2001, Vice President Al Gore oversaw the most humbling of certifications his own unsuccessful bid for the presidency in the closest election in American history.Words like fraud and disenfranchisement could be heard above the din of Republicans calling for regular order.Repeatedly, he was forced to gavel down members of the Congressional Black Caucus and others who tried to block the tallying of Floridas 25 highly contested and crucial electoral votes that made George W. Bush the nations 43rd president.

Despite the rancor in the cavernous House chamber, Gore carried out his constitutional duty with grace and humor.Three weeks earlier, a day after the Supreme Court, by a 5-4 vote in Bush v. Gore, stopped manual recounts in Florida that effectively delivered the election to Bush, Gore ended his quest for the presidency.In conceding, Gore said he strongly disagreed with the Supreme Court decision, but accepted the finality of this outcome and partisan rancor must now be put aside. This is America, and we put country before party.

Although a bare majority of Americans agreed with the Bush v. Gore decision, a Gallup Poll immediately afterwards found that 8 in 10 voters accepted Bush as the legitimate president.Clearly, how Gore handled himself following the determinative Supreme Court ruling and the electoral count had a significant effect.

How differently might history have played out on Jan. 6, 2021, if Donald Trump had not refused to concede?The Boston Globe suggested an unprecedented alternative, Mike Pence should concede the election. ... Doing so would help restore public trust in the electoral process and close the door on Trumps assault on American democracy.

While Pence did not concede, he resisted the pressure being exerted on him to try to single-handedly overturn the election.In their book Peril, Bob Woodward andRobert Costa write that Pence first reached out to former Vice President Dan Quayle, a fellow Indiana Republican, who told him not to even entertain the idea of blocking Bidens election when Congress certified the final electoral count.

Instead, Pence rewrote the vice presidential script for publicly counting electoral votes.Together with his top aides, he crafted 43 additional words that would clearly address the push by Trump allies for false slates of presidential electors.Even after the storming of the U.S. Capitol, Pence pursued his resolve to not be pressured into overturning the election.

Still for months Trump continued to claim Pence could have overturned the Election, Finally, in early February 2022, the former vice president publicly declared, President Trump is wrong, I had no right to overturn the election. The presidency belongs to the American people, and the American people alone. And frankly there is almost no idea more un-American than the notion that any one person could choose the American president.

Afterwards, The Wall Street Journal praised Pence for refusing to succumb to Mr. Trumps pressure. ...It was Mr. Pences finest hour.In subsequent days, most Americans also sided with Pence according to CBS News/YouGov and Quinnipiac University polls released after his speech in Orlando, Florida.

Irrespective of our party affiliation, we are all Americans.We must never forget what President Reagan said about the importance of our peaceful, orderly constitutional transfer of power.Al Gore and Mike Pence, in certainly one their most painful moments in public office, upheld their constitutional oath even when it is not politically expedient.

If we are not willing to accept election results, how is power to be passed from one leader to another in a law-abiding society in which the will of the voters governs?

Stephen W.Stathisfor nearly four decades was a specialist in American history with the Congressional Research Service (CRS) of the Library of Congress.He is the author ofLandmark Debates in Congress from the Declaration of Independence to the War in IraqandLandmark Legislation: Major U.S. Acts and Treaties.

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Opinion: Mike Pence and the long road out of the 2020 election

Members of the Jan. 6 committee said recently they might subpoena former Vice President Mike Pence to testify about the pressure he faced from then-President Donald Trump to overturn President Biden's victory in the 2020 election. Witnesses have testified to the panel that Trump called Pence on the morning of Jan. 6 to urge him one last time to stop the certification of Trump's loss to Biden when Congress met to finalize the Electoral College results. "It started off [in a] calmer tone ... and then it became heated," former White House lawyer Eric Herschmann told the committee, according to Axios. Ivanka Trump's then-chief of staff, Julie Radford, said Trump called Pence the "p-word" for resisting.

The committee has received the accounts of several Trump and Pence aides about the call. Now it wants to hear directly from Pence about what Trump asked him to do, and why he refused to reject Biden electors to tip the election to Trump. Trump allies vilify Pence for turning down his boss in his time of need. Critics of Trump's baseless claim that he lost to Biden due to election fraud say Pence never pushed back hard enough against the Big Lie. Still others say he's a hero for braving the backlash from MAGA world and doing the right thing to ensure the peaceful transfer of power to the duly elected president. How will history remember Pence's role in the Jan. 6 saga?

Mike Pence put the nation's interests before his own on Jan. 6, says Isaac Schorr at National Review. He has his eye on the White House, so "his political interests may have been better served by lending more credence to 'stop the steal,'" to please the MAGA base. But Pence drew the line where it had to be drawn, and bravely resisted "Trump's call to try to reject the legitimate Electoral College results." His former chief of staff, Marc Short, and former chief counsel, Greg Jacob, told the Jan. 6 committee that Pence never wavered in carrying out his duties on Jan. 6, not even as Trump "egged on a mob chanting 'hang Mike Pence' by tweeting 'Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.'" Pence, it turns out, did "have the courage to do what should have been done," and he saved the day.

A lot of liberals who used to mock Pence as spineless saw him in a new light on Jan. 6, says Kathleen Parker in The Washington Post. Not only did he stand his ground when Trump called him a "coward and worse," but he stayed at the Capitol that day as rioters shouted "Hang Mike Pence!" to do his job. Granted, he wavered before Jan. 6, and looked into whether there was a legal way to delay certification of the vote. Of course, the vice president has no right to stand in the way when Congress certifies the results of a presidential election, and Pence knew that. What he did took guts, but, remember: "Only in a country where duty has lost its currency and honesty is rare does doing the right thing rise to the level of heroic."

"I'm having a hard time joining the 'Mike Pence the Hero' bandwagon," says Bret Stephens at The New York Times. Why didn't he speak up in November when "Trump started lying" about the fact that Biden beat him? Or when Team Trump hired dodgy lawyers to "peddle insane conspiracy theories about voting machines and preposterous interpretations of the Electoral Count Act?" Pence is no hero. He's "a worm who, for a few hours on Jan. 6, turned into a glowworm."

If Pence felt heroic on Jan. 6, he got over it, says Inae Oh at Mother Jones. This week, he told Fox News Digital Monday that the Jan. 6 committee's public hearings were part of a Democratic political plot to, and I quote, "use that tragic day to distract attention from their failed agenda or to demean the intentions of 74 million Americans who rallied behind our cause." The man is flirting with his former boss' "election lies," there. He also claimed to be concerned about "voting irregularities" in the 2020 election, and insisted that he and Trump had talked out their differences. In another Fox News interview, he said Biden lies more than any president in his lifetime, proving unequivocally that he's still a "mealymouthed Trump stooge."

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Is Mike Pence a hero? - The Week

The past couple of weeks have been filled with controversial and historic events, and were not even halfway through summer. Amid all this, it seems like some Republicans tread lightly on certain issues, while others do not.

In the aftermath of Roe v. Wades overturning, Republican candidates wonder how it will alter the 2024 election.

In the Republican Party, there is a debate underway about whether the ruling could come back to haunt candidates in future elections, the Washington Post writes.

A Republican strategist believes the GOP candidates that lean further to the Right on abortion could sabotage their chances in the general election.

The safest place for Republicans is to say, Send it to the states," the strategist said.

But downplaying the decision wont make you a more desirable candidate. Those that have a clear platform and stance on important issues will be able to distinguish who will and will not support them.

For example, former Vice President Mike Pence has been very vocal about his thoughts on the overturning of Roe.

We must not rest and must not relent until the sanctity of life is restored to the center of American law in every state in the land, Pence tweeted.

Even as the former governor of Indiana, Pence made an effort to sign as many pro-life bills as he could. From the start, it has been clear where Pence stands on abortion. Other potential candidates? Not so much. Its not about if they support the court's decision but rather how far they will personally go to uproot abortion rights.

Pence has set the standard, calling for a nationwide ban, while other candidates avoid such language.

Gov. Ron DeSantis says Florida will work to expand pro-life protections, and will stand for life.

While many Republican politicians support the Dobbs decision, calling for an increase in adoption, welfare, and aid for struggling families, others have a more moderate approach.

Most of the people I talk to believe there ought to be reasonable restrictions and reasonable exceptions, Florida Sen. Rick Scott said. But every candidates going to decide where they are.

Scott has endorsed banning abortion after 15 weeks. He has been more focused on enacting legislation that protects family welfare than furthering abortion bans.

Because that is the solution for most Republicans to combat the growing issue of abortion rights, the 2024 GOP field will be somewhat fragmented. For them, life either begins at conception, or it doesn't. They are either pro-life or not.

The last thing these candidates need to do is hide behind the promise of increased welfare and protection for struggling women yet fail to advance abortion bans.

Yes, increasing aid to those who need help is essential, but running a campaign that says just that and avoiding the actual debate on abortion laws will not make for an honest candidate. Voters need to know where these candidates clearly stand on issues that will contribute to the 2024 election results. They need to stop being wishy-washy and tell the people what they really think.

Esther Wickham is a summer 2022Washington Examinerfellow.

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This is not the time to be wishy-washy - Washington Examiner

President Joe Bidens effort to trash the patriotic MAGA movement reveals the desperation of a flailing and floundering administration, according to former Vice President Mike Pence.

Pence responded to Bidens attacks on the movement, known by the acronym for former President Donald Trumps Make America Great Again slogan, during an interview with Fox News on Saturday prior to speaking at Patrick Henry College in Virginia.

Let me tell you about this ultra MAGA agenda. Its extreme, as most MAGA things are, Biden said during a news conference last week.

What are the next things that are going to be attacked? Because this MAGA crowd is really the most extreme political organization thats existed in American history in recent American history, he said.

Pences defense came despite efforts to paint him as a critic of the MAGA movement following the events of Jan. 6, 2021, when some narratives pointed to the then-vice president as a target of those who stormed the Capitol.

With all due respect, President Biden sounds desperate, Pence said. It sounds like the rhetoric of an administration grasping for straws.

I mean, look, the presidents approval rating speaks for itself. He is exploring the bowels of American approval numbers in modern history. And its because the American people see the failed policies of this administration at home and abroad, he said.

Pence said Bidens efforts to trash the MAGA movement smeared millions of Americans.

Do you agree with Pence?

Yes: 99% (224 Votes)

No: 1% (2 Votes)

And I think theres no amount of, you know, any effort by this administration to demean the 74 million people that supported this [MAGA] movement. And millions of Americans who know our economy can be strong, our borders can be secure, and that America can be respected on the world stage and our values can be respected in our courts, [values] that they love, he said, according to Fox News.

The former vice president said Biden will spur MAGA supporters to even more activism by demeaning them.

That kind of rhetoric [by Biden] will only serve to motivate people that share our values and our vision for the country to turn out to vote, Pence said.

Now with regard to its impact on elections, I must tell you that, look, the failed policies of the Biden administration are almost too many to recount, he said. The disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan, the emboldening of the enemies of freedom around the world. The inflation at a 40-year high, the worst border crisis in history, a crime wave in our cities. All are a testament to the failed left-wing policies of the Biden administration.

And I fully expect that voters are going to carry their strong feelings about that into the voting booth.

Pence said the renewed debate over abortion that has come amid a leaked draft opinion that indicates five justices could support overturning the Roe v. Wade decision crystallizes the differences between parties.

I honestly believe that there is no more important issue in the life of the nation than the sanctity of life, he said. And so for me, thats where this debate lies.

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