‘Mother’? Oh, brother!

By BRUCE LOWITT

Mike Pence is challenging special counsel Jack Smith’s subpoena requiring him to testify about events surrounding the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol, but the former vice president insists it’s not that his wife told him not to do it.

“It’s not because ‘Mother’ said I shouldn’t,” Pence said, using the name he affectionately calls his wife. “It’s because my mother said I shouldn’t and a boy should always listen to his mother, right?”

“Whoa!” Karen Pence, seated next to her husband, exclaimed. “I’ve been married to this guy for thirty-seven years and he’s been calling me ‘Mother’ for most of them. At first I thought it was kind of cute, especially when Michael, Audrey and Charlotte were born. “

But she said it “started getting kind of old” about the time he became vice president and that he hadn’t referred to her that way since some time in 2018, “so when he told reporters last week that ‘mother’ said he should fight the subpoena, I thought it was just a slip of the tongue because I did sort of suggest to him he’d be a freaking idiot to testify.”

The former vice president said he used “mother” in the conversation with reporters because “my mother’s name is Ann Jane Fritz Pence but she also goes by the first name Nancy and sometimes her original birth name of Cawley, and it gets kind of confusing, so that’s why I said mother. But, yes, she knows what’s right for me and I really love her and, well, you know, I wouldn’t want to disappoint her.”

Pence said he initially was willing to accept the subpoena and testify why he refused to agree to former President Donald Trump’s demand to reject or delay the counting of ballots that would certify the election of Joe Biden as president, even if it would offend or anger Trump’s base of the Republican Party that threatened to hang him when it stormed the Capitol.

“But then my mother, who is really, really smart, called and told me about this ‘speech and debate clause’ in the Constitution, which I’d never heard of,” Pence said. “That’s what I get for having never read it. The clause says senators and members of the House can’t be questioned anywhere but in the Congress about anything Congress does, or something like that, I think. Isn’t that right, mo- … I mean Karen? Ow!”

No one saw why Pence suddenly leaped to his feet and reached behind him at the same time his wife stood up and stormed away. But a recording of the incident revealed a woman’s voice shouting “Carmel” and Flaningham” and “Oedipus” and “one shot at her” moments before a door slammed.

In a phone call to Dr. Tyler Flaningham, the Carmel, Indiana, psychiatrist acknowledged the existence of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory of the Oedipus Complex, a boy’s unconscious sexual desire for a parent of the opposite sex, but declined to comment on anything the Pences might have said or done and denied having had any contact with either of them.

In a related development, Vince McMahon, executive chairman of World Wrestling Entertainment, said he has posted a two-million-dollar bond to attract Karen Pence, 66, and, as he put it, “Ann Jane Nancy Fritz Pence Cawley,” 89, to meet “at the time and location of their agreed-upon choice to settle things, mother to mother.”

Neither has as yet responded to the invitation.