Mitt Romney’s profile in courage
By The Salt Lake Tribune Editorial Board
· Published: 17 hours ago
Updated: 15 hours ago
“I almost literally looked down into my open grave. Friendships, position, fortune, everything that makes life desirable to an ambitious man were about to be swept away by the breath of my mouth, perhaps forever.”
— Sen. Edmund G. Ross, R-Kansas, reflecting on his deciding vote to acquit the impeached President Andrew Johnson in 1868.
Mitt Romney could have ducked this one.
He could have voted with the rest of the Republican members of the Senate of the United States to acquit the president of the United States on both of the articles of impeachment brought by the House of Representatives. He could have rationalized it — to himself, to his party, to his state, to his family, to history — by noting, as he did Wednesday, that his vote wasn’t going to be the crucial one.
But he couldn’t explain it to his conscience.
Romney, and everyone else, knew that his decision to vote to convict and remove the president on the first article of impeachment — abuse of power — was not going to change the fact that a president who very much deserves to be removed from office won’t be. That he will remain in office at least until January of 2021 and in the meantime is in a position, along with the rabid base of supporters in the party and in the Senate, to make life very difficult for Romney going forward.
The junior senator from Utah could have rested on the fact that he was one of only two Republican senators to vote to call witnesses in the trial. He could have said, to us and to history, that he did what he could and, having honorably failed at that, was prepared to vote with the rest of his party to acquit the president and move on.
But when it was crunch time, Romney just could not avert his eyes from the fact that this president had, without a shadow of a doubt, abused his power as commander and chief.
In Romney’s own words:
“The President asked a foreign government to investigate his political rival. The President withheld vital military funds from that government to press it to do so. The President delayed funds for an American ally at war with Russian invaders. The President’s purpose was personal and political. Accordingly, the President is guilty of an appalling abuse of the public trust.”
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