A long but brilliant article written about Murica's Sycophant-in-Chief. Worth the read.
Pence served twelve years in Congress, but never authored a single successful bill. His sights, according to Leppert, were always on the national ticket. He gained attention by challenging his own partys leaders, both in Congress and in the George W. Bush Administration, from the right. He broke with the vast majority of his Republican peers by opposing Bushs expansion of Medicaid coverage for prescription drugs, along with the No Child Left Behind initiative and the Troubled Asset Relief Program, the governments emergency bailout of banks. Conway calls him a rebel with a cause. In 2004, the Houses most conservative members elected him to head their caucus, the Republican Study Committee. Pence joked that the group was so alien to the Partys mainstream that running it was like leading a Star Trek convention. He was as far right as you could go without falling off the earth, Mike Lofgren, a former Republican congressional staff member, who has become a Trump critic, told me. But he never really put a foot wrong politically. Beneath the Bible-thumping earnestness was a calculating and ambitious pol.