Before walking out of the Capitol, his phone rang, according to Rice. On the other hand, the House Republican whip was Steve Scalise of Louisiana, who did not think he actually wanted to accuse the then president.
“I said, ‘I pressed the right button,'” Rice said.
But Trump supporters at home do not think he did it. Rice may now be one of the few members of Congress to face a political award for the vote. In the ensuing weeks, several Republicans or campaigns launched or threatened to run against the five-term congressman, knowing that 59% of the Myrtle Beach district supported the former president over Joe Biden.
“There’s a firestorm,” said Katon Dawson, a former South Carolina GOP president and Rice ally. “South Carolina is big for Donald Trump.”
But Rice is not sorry. He spent the days before the vote and “pulled everything I could find” about what Trump did, and whether it would fit the alleged charge, “incitement to rebellion.”
“There were very close voices I could both go to, and sometimes I guess myself,” Rice said. “It’s not one of the voices.”
IDP challengers emerge
Before the January 6 disaster at the Capitol, Trump repeatedly told his supporters to “stop the theft!” In a speech that day, he urged his supporters ‘to make your voice heard peacefully and patriotically’, but also to ‘fight like hell’, ‘never give up’ and ‘never give in’ .
Rice noted that Trump tweeted that then-Vice President Mike Pence “did not” have the courage to oversee the certification of the election, which was his constitutional obligation, during the riot. The mob searched Pence’s speaker and home, Nancy Pelosi, and searched the senators’ desks on the room floor.
Rice said it is clear that Trump committed the crime and agrees with many of the points made by the House executives during the indictment last week.
“If it’s not a major crime or offense, I do not know what it is,” Rice of Trump’s actions said that day. “I do not know what the president could have done worse, unless he himself got down there and started shooting at us or something.”
Ken Richardson, chairman of the Horry County Board of Education, has already announced his campaign. Richardson told CNN that he intended to run against Congressman in 2024, after completing another term in office, but his term of office voted after the indictment.
“Sometimes when stars are standing in line, you have to take advantage of it,” Richardson said.
Republican state Rep. Heather Ammons Crawford said voters in the Rice district were “very upset” about his vote. Asked if Trump played a role in the deadly riot, she said: “It doesn’t matter what I think. It matters what the voters think.”
Rice acknowledged that his decision concerned Republicans in his district, claiming that his office had received about 5,000 calls from his constituents against accusation and 4,000 in favor of it, but said his opponents would have a “hard time” to win themselves as their basis for justification. the attack on the Capitol.
Rice said he will fight to his record in 2022, working on issues such as beach nutrition, hurricane relief and port infrastructure for his tourism-dependent district in the northeastern lowlands of Palmetto state.
He said he supports the Biden government to spend billions more to promote vaccine production and distribution, and that he will consider a little more stimulus for Americans. But he said he opposed the Democrats’ overall aid proposal for Covid-19.
“There are just too many things in this $ 1.9 billion liberal wish list, with pork, that I just can not claim,” Rice said.
“He knew he was going to catch a devil.”
Walter Whetsell, an adviser to the Rice campaign, claimed that the primary election was more than a year from now and that the anger was even less than a month ago.
“It’s going to be really hard to run a campaign against Tom Rice based on Trump factors,” Whetsell said. “He has a very, very good record of supporting the things in Congress that Donald Trump fought for.”
J. Edward Bell III, a lawyer in South Carolina who donated to Democrats and Republicans, including Rice, said he was “glad as I can be to see someone vote their conscience.”
“He knew he was going to catch a little devil, but I think in the long run if Trump … seems to start shrinking, I think he will be looked back on as a visionary,” Bell said.
Rice himself thinks that Trump is the one who has lost political support. If the presidential election were to be held now, he said Trump would lose in a “landslide” against Biden.
“I can absolutely assure you that he will not get anything approaching 74 million votes,” Rice said. “I doubt he would win my district today.”
Yet Rice can enlist the help of the Republican Party’s business wing.
Many corporations have decided to suspend and review their donations to the 147 Republicans in Congress, which objected to the certification of the 2020 election, a typical humdrum matter that the rioters of Trump in a last-ditch position changed to reverse the election.
Rice pointed out that some House Democrats have also objected to the certification in previous election cycles. “I think the Republicans are the only ones who are expected to be responsible,” he said.
But Rice said he does not regret raising the question of voter fraud, although there is no evidence and Trump has lost numerous challenges in court. He said a letter from the Pennsylvania Senate president was critical to his decision to lodge an objection, although he “second guesses” it after the Capitol violation. He said he had already announced his position and “did not want to return to my word” and changed it.
Rice clearly did not appreciate Trump’s strongly armed approach to the vote, or the pro-Trump mob that uses violence to make its point.
“It’s the executive branch that is attacking the legislature,” Rice said. “And I do not suffer well from bullying.”