WASHINGTON (OSV News) — Former Vice President Mike Pence Oct. 3 called himself “deeply disappointed” by California Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s ouster as speaker of the House of Representatives that same day, after eight House Republicans joined with Democrats to remove McCarthy from the role, the first such move in the history of the U.S. House.
Asked to respond to McCarthy’s removal from the role as news broke during a national security and foreign policy event at Washington’s Georgetown University co-hosted by The Associated Press, Pence, who is seeking his party’s presidential nomination in 2024, replied, “Well let me say that chaos is never America’s friend.”
“And it’s never a friend of American families that are struggling,” Pence said. “And I’m deeply disappointed that a handful of Republicans would partner with all the Democrats in the House of Representatives to oust the Speaker of the House.”
The Catholic university intends to co-host with AP a series of national security and foreign policy discussions with the 2024 presidential contenders, open to Georgetown students. Students from colleges in the early voting states of Iowa and New Hampshire also joined the discussion virtually. One student asked Pence for his thoughts about the status of religious liberty around the globe.
Pence replied that in the United States, religious liberty is “rightly understood to be our first freedom,” motivating many of the first Americans who left their homelands to seek it, and the United States now should conduct itself in foreign policy as a “beacon of hope” to countries without such protections.
Pence also condemned remarks by his former running mate-turned-rival, Donald Trump, after the former president called retired Gen. Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, “treasonous” in a social media post for reaching out to his Chinese military counterpart in the closing days of the Trump administration.
“Frankly what Donald Trump said about him in that tweet, about treason and death, was utterly inexcusable,” Pence said.
Arguing against an isolationist approach to foreign policy adopted by some in his party, Pence also criticized President Joe Biden’s “disastrous withdrawal” from Afghanistan in 2021.
“America is the leader of the free world,” he said. “If we’re not leading the free world, the free world is not being led.”
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