J Michael Luttig, a former federal judge and Republican, said during his testimony to the House select committee on the January 6 attack that Mike Pence could have plunged the US into a ‘revolution within a constitutional crisis’. If the vice-president had followed the lead of Donald Trump and rejected the result of the 2020 elección, Luttig warned, the US would have faced its first constitutional crisis ‘since the founding of the republic’. En 2021, Luttig outlined his view that the vice-president had only the power to count the electoral college votes as they are cast, not to alter them or reject them
