Indiana Gov. Mike Pence served five terms in Congress and worked his way up to a leadership role in the House. Since he has sealed his Congressional records until December 2022, we’ve done what we can to dig up the best reporting on Donald Trump’s would-be vice president.
Pence describes himself as “a Christian, a conservative and a Republican, in that order.” He may be best known outside his state for his defense of Indiana’s religious freedom restoration law, which allowed businesses to deny service to gays and lesbians.
He started his political career as a Democrat who keptclippings of John F. Kennedy in his Indiana home as a boy. But in law school, his views shifted to the right. By 1988, at the age of 29, he ran as a Republican to try to unseat the Democratic incumbent in Indiana’s 2nd district and lost. He lost to the same candidate in 1990 after an ugly race that featured an ad with an actor dressed to look Arab thanking his opponent for foreign oil support. Pence’s campaign paid for his car payment and golf fees. (A year later, he wrote an essay called “Confessions of a Negative Campaigner” and repudiated his own style.)
Pence found his niche in talk radio in 1992 with “The Mike Pence Show,” which was syndicated across the state two years later. From 1995 to 1999, he hosted an Indianapolis political talk show on television. In 2000, he re-entered the political arena and finally won his seat to Congress (later redrawn as Indiana’s 6th district). An envelope with traces ofanthrax welcomed Pence to the Capitol during the 2001 scare.
The Hoosier quickly became known in Congress as a small-government, small-budget purist, fighting against many of then-president George W. Bush’s initiatives. He derided the No Child Left Behind education reform as “more red tape.” He opposed Bush’s push to extend Medicare Part D and subsidize senior citizens’ prescription drugs. As the Great Recession began, he vehemently opposed the 2008 bailouts.
Pence waded into the immigration battle in 2006 with a proposed compromise that would focus first on border security and, once that was accomplished, incentivize undocumented immigrants to “self-deport” and reapply to be guest workers. The proposal quickly brought the scorn of the right. Pence’s proposal failed, and he ultimately opposed the 2007 deal that never passed.
Unlike his counterpart at the top of the ticket, Pence has repeatedly backed protections for the press, introducing and reintroducing a federal shield law that would protect reporters’ confidential sources, with exceptions including national security. “Without the free flow of information from sources to reporters, the public is ill-equipped to make informed decisions,” he said in 2011.
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