Senator Romney, you’re positioned to do a lot of good, if you wanted. Why don’t you want to?
We heard your moving statement when you voted to convict Donald Trump in his second impeachment trial. You conveyed that acting honestly in accordance with the morality of your faith was compelling to you, and you were compelled therefore to vote to convict Donald Trump even though the great majority of your fellow Senators were committed to protecting the clearly lawless President who’d just incited an attempted coup d’etat.
What you did in the Senate, Liz Cheney also did in the House.
But Ms. Cheney, Wyoming’s sole member of the House of Representatives, didn’t stop there. She has embraced the path of integrity and is continuing to fight to preserve American democracy against the threat that you saw clearly enough when you had to judge the impeachment.
Surely, if you saw Trump’s crimes clearly then, you are fully aware of the continuing assault on American democracy being made by your Party. Liz Cheney keeps voting in the Insurrection Committee — where she is deputy chair — to uphold the rule of law, and keeps speaking to the American people about truths quite vital to whether American democracy will survive.
But not you. She was heroic enough to be willing to sacrifice her political future because American democracy needs to be defended. What’s holding you back? Why aren’t you doing everything you can to help American democracy in the face of your Party’s “failing the moral test of our times,” as Liz Cheney put it. And you could do a lot.
You could be making statements that grab headlines, reinforcing what Liz Cheney is saying. You aren’t on the Commission, but you know how the criminality that was presented in the Impeachment Trial wasn’t confined to the Insurrection and wasn’t confined to Trump.
You’re a smart guy, you can see how your party is assaulting our democracy in a variety of ways. What’s keeping you from talking about what you see as powerfully as Liz Cheney does. The GOP is trying to cover up it’s complicity in that coup d’etat, while it is also making visible efforts to prepare for seizing power the next time in ways that go against the Constitution and the rule of law.
You know this isn’t partisan: it’s about the defense of the Constitution (which all from both parties have taken a sacred oath to defend against the “domestic” enemies like what today’s Republican Party has become.
And you could be available to help the Democrats with an extra vote in the Senate, thus disabling Joe Manchin from playing the extraordinarily destructive role he’s playing, exploiting how the situation in the Senate gives every Senator the ability to disable the body, so long as all 50 Republicans play their obstructive role.
You know that your party is doing scandalous things at the state level to enable the Republicans to win elections despite only minority support. You know that the Voting Rights legislation that needs to be passed — protecting such rights used to get unanimous, bi-partisan support in the Senate, but is now blocked by the Republicans’ use of the filibuster— must be passed by the Senate to protect the integrity of our elections.
If Manchin is the only one blocking the change in the filibuster rule that’s necessary for the Senate to pass the absolutely essential voting rights bill, then your vote for a “carve out” in the filibuster would be as much in fulfillment of the oath you took as your vote to convict Trump.
Indeed, you could even go further and call out the complete indefensibility of the Republicans across-the-board obstructionism, and provide votes to enable the President of the United States to accomplish things that are clearly good for the nation’s future, and are favored by substantial majorities of the American people.
Sure, this will enrage a lot of people. But Liz Cheney is brave enough to accept her political sacrifice, because she knows there are things more important than her own political future.
(Hell, over the generations, we’ve asked American soldiers to die for their country. How can there be so few Republicans willing to give up merely a nice political office, and retreat to private life?)
Would you do less than all you could for American democracy to protect your political future at the age of 74? Liz Cheney — in her political prime at 55 — was willing to sacrifice hers to honor her oath of office? Why not you?
You’ve got credibility to speak, given your being the most recent non-Trump Republican nominee for the Presidency.
And you are positioned — in this 50-50 Senate — to help protect American democracy (and help a lot of good things happen).
Take your inspiration from Liz Cheney. American democracy is in jeopardy, and all good men must now come to the aid of their country.