The Usual Suspect

Mike Pence is being... Mike Pence

He’s at it again.

You know the guy—the one with the brilliant white hair and the face that barely moves. Old boomer. Looks like the uncle from that cartoon Johnny Quest. Usual suspect.

Mike Pence!

Yes, Mike Pence is doing what Mike Pence does best and getting in the way of MAGA and being a general pain in the ass.

Not content with helping to kill an immediate investigation into the 2020 election­—which we now know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, was rigged (unless you believe fifteen million voters simply disappeared…)—this time Pence is trying to block RFK Jr.’s appointment to Health and Human Services. Trump hasn’t even been inaugurated yet.

Pence called on Senate Republicans to refuse to install Kennedy, on the grounds of his attitude towards abortion and reproductive rights.

In a long statement posted by the Advancing America Foundation on Twitter, Pence said, “I believe the nomination of RFK Jr. to serve as Secretary of HHS is an abrupt departure from the pro-life record of our administration and should be deeply concerning to millions of Pro-Life Americans who have supported the Republican Party and our nominees for decades.”

Pence said the appointment is unsuitable because “there are hundreds of decisions made at HHS every day that either lead our nation toward a respect for life or away from it, and HHS under our administration always stood for life.”

Pence claimed RFK Jr. has been a staunch advocate of “abortion on demand during all nine months of pregnancy” and wants to overturn the Dobbs decision and introduce legislation to “codify Roe v. Wade.”

“If confirmed, RFK, Jr. would be the most pro-abortion Republican appointed secretary of HHS in modern history.”

“The pro-life movement has always looked to the Republican party to stand for life, to affirm an unborn child has a fundamental right to life which cannot be infringed,” Pence continued, before ending the statement with a plea to resist the appointment directly in the legislature.

“On behalf of tens of millions of pro-life Americans, I respectfully urge Senate Republicans to reject this nomination and give the American people a leader who will respect the sanctity of life as secretary of Health and Human Services.”

I’m sure Pence’s opposition to RFK Jr. being head of Health and Human Services is motivated entirely by his moral concern for the lives of unborn children, and has absolutely nothing to do with any kind of associations Pence has with Big Pharma and the corrupt medical and agricultural industries Kennedy has firmly in his sights.

According to data from Open Secrets, although health wasn’t among the top sectors donating to Mike Pence in 2024, agribusiness was. Pence has received $590,000 in agribiz donations this year. Last year, Eli Lilly—the pharma company that makes Ozempic competitor Mounjaro—made a large donation to Committed to America, a PAC set up to support Pence’s failed presidential bid. And during Trump’s first term, another Pence PAC, Great America Committee, received money from PACs tied to huge pharma players like Novo Nordisk, Merck, Eli Lilly again, Sunovion and Johnson and Johnson.

The Advancing Freedom Foundation, which posted Pence’s anti-RFK statement, received $100,000 from the Searle Foundation, which represents the G.D. Searle pharmaceutical empire built on Ambien and Dramamine and the aspartame in Donald Trump’s Diet Coke.

And remember that minor scandal during the pandemic, when it was revealed that Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, owned millions of dollars of stocks in pharma companies that were working to formulate vaccines and manufacture protective equipment etc.? That included big shares in Johnson and Johnson, Pfizer and Merck—all vaccine manufacturers—and Gilead Sciences, which came up with the utterly useless death sentence of an drug called Remdesivir.

But all of this is probably inconsequential, meaningless.

Let’s just assume Pence only cares about the unborn and not the plummeting stock prices of Pfizer, Modern, Lily et al. since RFK Jr.’s nomination. What then?