Following his vote yesterday to convict President Donald Trump on the House’s first adopted impeachment article, “abuse of power,” Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT) is being hailed and feted as a paragon of moral conviction and political principle by all sorts of strange new friends. In Romney’s mild defense, his Senate floor speech explaining his vote evinced a genuine internal struggle, and he voted to acquit the president on the risible, constitutionally illiterate second impeachment charge of “obstruction of Congress.”
Let us first state the obvious: Romney made the wrong decision to vote to convict the president on the first article of impeachment. This was the most blatantly partisan impeachment sham in a century and a half, going back to the vehement “Radical Republican” opposition to President Andrew Johnson. The conduct upon which Democrats attempted to impeach Trump is dramatically less ruinous than the conduct upon which the Framers would have considered impeachment justified, and reeks of the sort of petty politics that led the Framers to deliberately reject the far lesser “maladministration” as a possible constitutional standard for impeachment.
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