Last summer, in a private moment at the memorial service for ex-senator Joe Lieberman at the Washington Hebrew Congregation, two former vice presidents had a conversation.
Al Gore thanked Mike Pence, according to people close to both men, in an interaction that’s never been reported, for his actions at the Capitol the day it was attacked by a mob. Pence, on the opposite side of the political aisle but in the same set of pews, said something surprising in response. He suggested to Gore he had done what he’d done on Jan. 6, 2021, in part because of what he had seen as a newly sworn-in member of Congress on Jan. 6, 2001. He had witnessed a vice president like him stand up to pressure from his own party to defy the Constitution even though doing so by definition meant personal defeat.
“I never forgot it,” Pence said to Gore, in the recollection of a Pence ally…