This piece will be appearing this weekend as a newspaper op/ed in my very red congressional district (in which I was the Democratic nominee for Congress — against Bob Goodlatte — in 2012).
*********************
The logical process begins with asking, “What should we make of Mitt Romney’s vote, at the end of the Impeachment trial, to remove Donald Trump from office?”
Any Republican who faults Romney for that vote presumably believes that Trump did not deserve removal. And that would imply that either 1) Romney lacked the capacity to judge what Trump had done or 2) he knowingly voted to remove a President – of his own Party – who did not deserve to be removed.
Every attentive Republican knows that Romney is a pretty smart guy, someone whose history shows him to be highly capable. The idea that he lacked the capacity to judge Trump’s conduct seems insupportable.
And likewise, the idea that he would knowingly vote to remove a Republican President who doesn’t deserve it defies everything we know about what kind of person Mitt Romney is.
More than any Republican in this era, Mitt Romney is a “Scout’s honor” kind of guy. In his statement announcing his vote, and addressing the abuse he anticipated receiving from his fellow Republicans, Romney asked: “Does anyone seriously believe I would consent to [the disapproval and abuse] other than from an inescapable conviction that my oath before God demanded it of me?”
(And that’s particularly implausible in view of how Romney has shown himself over the years to be someone who puts a premium on getting along well with those around him -- whether to get a Winter Olympics well-set up, or to be an effective Republican governor in a predominantly Democratic state.)
The conclusion is inescapable: this Boy Scout of a Republican voted to remove Donald Trump from the Presidency because his conscience demanded it. I.e. because the trial had proved Trump guilty of offenses so serious that he was obliged to vote that way by the oath he’d taken – before God -- to “protect and defend the Constitution.”
And if Romney’s vote to remove Trump was required to honor his oath, logic requires us to conclude further that every other Republican in the Senate violated their oath.
And that evidence -- that 52 out of 53 Republican Senators chose to protect a seriously guilty President rather than the Constitution they’d pledged to protect – compels us to conclude: the Republican Party in these times is morally bankrupt.
(People often tell me that evidence and logic have little sway among the Republican base. And I must concede, the evidence backs that up. But I’m something of a one-trick pony, when it comes to how to seek the truth. So I’m stuck with telling the truth the evidence points to.)
Regarding Trump, the impeachment showed a remarkable trifecta of wrong-doing. He
- committed crimes (withholding money he was legally obliged to release, and seeking illegal foreign help in an election);
- utilizing means that betrayed the national security of the United States (weakening our Ukrainian ally and strengthening our main world adversary, Putin’s Russia);
- in order to promote a lie (getting the Ukrainians to announce an investigation --Trump insisted only on the announcement) to besmirch a political opponent (Joe Biden) with a false innuendo of scandal.
Trump continues to try to demonize Biden in the eyes of the American people. But so far at least, Trump’s smears have failed to stick. I see two reasons for that failure.
For one thing, people feel they know Joe Biden. He has been around for a long time, and he seems to be quite transparent: what you see is what you get.
And what people see in Biden is consistent with what Republican Senator Lindsey Graham said about Biden in 2015: “If you can’t admire Joe Biden as a person, then you got a problem,” Graham said. Biden’s “as good a man as God created.” (Quite understandably, the video of this is playing in ads put out by Biden’s supporters.)
I believe there’s another reason that the dirt that Trump has been trying to fling at Biden hasn’t stuck: in this political moment, a great many Americans feel a need for Biden to be everything Trump is not.
For a majority of Americans, it seems, this election is an opportunity to come out from under the sway of a President who is corrupt, lawless, dishonest, self-centered, indifferent to the well-being of the people he’s supposed to serve.
That basic framing of the election generates a psychological force that casts Biden -- as the alternative to Trump -- as the opposite of all that.
Fortunately, in terms of character, Biden seems to fill that need pretty well.
But I’d wager that even if there were something shady in Biden’s past that Trump could point to – and, again, it appears that Biden’s clean – Americans generally would be disinclined to focus on it.
We have seen such darkness, the hunger now is for the light.