Is Mitt Romney Going To Put Mike Pence Into The Oval Office?

Tuesday night after Bill Taylor's closed-door testimony, the New York Times speculated that it might be a game-changer. "Taylor’s vivid depiction illustrated the differences between the impeachment inquiry against Mr. Trump and the ones that consumed Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Bill Clinton. While the Watergate and Monica Lewinsky cover-ups involved the integrity of America’s democracy and system of justice, the Ukraine scandal also extends to matters of life and death, as well as geopolitics on a grand scale. Mr. Taylor’s testimony could make it harder for Republicans to brush off Mr. Trump’s actions as unimportant or distorted by partisan foes. Defending Ukraine against Russian encroachment, much like defending the United States’ Kurdish allies against Turkey, has been a high priority for many Republicans, who complained that President Barack Obama did not stand up to Moscow aggressively enough."

As more polling shows independent voters having turned away from Trump and followed Democrats into "impeach and remove" territory, Dan Balz, writing for the Washington Post about the obvious quid pro quo, noted that "It is no longer a question of whether this happened. It is now a question of how the president explains it and how lawmakers-- especially Republicans-- choose to respond to it. Republican lawmakers face a new calculus as they digest the contents of the Taylor testimony. They will have great difficulty denying that the suspension of the aid was being linked to an investigation of a political rival of the president. Will they conclude that what the president did was legitimate? Will they attempt to point in other directions? Will they argue that what Trump did wasn’t right but isn’t impeachable? There’s less room for equivocation about what happened today than there was before."

Crackpots and partisan scoundrels without a shred of dignity in deep red House districts-- like Gym Jordan (R-OH), Mark Meadows (R-NC), Matt Gaetz (R-FL), Louie Gohmert (R-TX), Bradley Byrne (R-AL) and Clay Higgins (R-LA)-- can deny that the sky is blue and claim the moon is made of cheese and the earth is flat all they want, but Republican senators have a different kind of calculus to contend with. All but a few states have large independent blocs of voters and outside of deep red states (Arkansas, Wyoming, Kentucky, the Dakotas, Alabama, West Virginia, Utah, Tennessee and Oklahoma) no one wins statewide without cobbling together a coalition of voters that includes independents. This cycle, that is especially dangerous for Republicans running for the Senate in Maine, Iowa, Colorado, North Carolina, Arizona, Georgia, Montana... maybe even Alaska, Nebraska and Kansas, where Trump's toxicity is dragging the party down.

The House is going to impeach Trump. That's a certainty; the votes are already there, even if Republicans like Fred Upton (MI), John Katko (NY), Brian Fitzpatrick (PA), Chris Smith (NJ), Tom McClintock (CA), Jaime Herrera Beutler (WA), George Holding (NC), Brian Mast (FL), Lee Zelden (NY), Pete King (NY), Rodney Davis (IL)... decide to commit political suicide and vote against it. (I guess some of them would be committing political suicide if they decide to vote for impeachment too.) But the Senate... What do Susan Collins, Cory Booker, Thom Tillis, Martha McSally, Joni Ernst do-- dead meat if they vote to find Trump guilty/dead meat if they find him innocent. Yesterday The Atlantic published an essay, Mitt Romney, It's Time, by Sarah Longhill, executive director of a Never Trump group, Republicans For The Rule of Law. This is the online version of the ad her group started running on Fox & Friends today:





Longhill wrote that Trump has "bullied and insulted, mocked and complained about nearly every GOP officeholder past and present, including George W. Bush and Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Jeff Flake. He knew that the Republicans who dared to stand up to him couldn’t hurt him (Bob Corker), and that the Republicans who could have hurt him wouldn’t dare stand up to him (Paul Ryan). All of which has led Trump to believe that there is no possible danger of the Republican Party being pried from his grasp. But Trump may at last need to rethink that calculus."

Mitt Romney’s attempt to excise Trump from his party started early. In March 2016, he became the only former Republican presidential nominee to take a public position against Trump’s candidacy. This act of resistance didn’t work, however, because while Romney had moral authority, he had no real power.

That situation changed this year, when Romney again became an elected official. On January 1, 2019, the newly minted Senator Romney announced his arrival in Washington with an op-ed in the Washington Post titled, “The President Shapes the Public Character of the Nation. Trump’s Character Falls Short.”

After having softened his criticism of the president and even tacitly accepting his endorsement during his Senate campaign in Utah, Romney wrote:

To a great degree, a presidency shapes the public character of the nation. A president should unite us and inspire us to follow “our better angels.” A president should demonstrate the essential qualities of honesty and integrity, and elevate the national discourse with comity and mutual respect. As a nation, we have been blessed with presidents who have called on the greatness of the American spirit. With the nation so divided, resentful and angry, presidential leadership in qualities of character is indispensable. And it is in this province where the incumbent’s shortfall has been most glaring.

Democrats and some pundits sniffed that Romney was just another Jeff Flake, all bark and no bite. Republicans derided the decision to call Trump out, with many of them attacking Romney in response-- including his own niece, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, who called his criticism “disappointing and unproductive.”

The backlash to the op-ed was a crash course in “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” But if you look closely, you can see that Romney was laying the groundwork for an eventual challenge to Trump. He was getting into position to get into position.

That said, he didn’t mobilize over the Mueller report, saying only that he was “sickened” by what the special counsel uncovered. Romney’s relatively low profile and mere brow furrowing exasperated Democrats and worried apostate Republicans (like me), who held out hope that Romney might become a Goldwater-like figure in the Senate: a former presidential nominee with the clout to exact some accountability from his party’s president.

Now it looks like Romney was playing the long game, waiting for a moment when there might be leverage for him not simply to annoy Trump, but to be in the jury box rendering a verdict on his presidency. Which is exactly where the whistle-blower report about Trump and his dealings with Ukraine may put him. Suddenly we’ve gone from an environment where impeachment couldn’t even clear the House Democratic caucus to one where polling support for impeachment and removal is above 50 percent, and rising.

Romney has not rushed to get ahead of the process. Instead, he’s engaged with characteristic caution. At first, he called the allegations “troubling in the extreme.” When the readout of Trump’s call with President Volodymyr Zelensky and the whistle-blower complaint became public, providing clearer evidence that the president had courted foreign interference in the coming election, and seemingly pressured a vulnerable ally to do the interfering, Romney stepped up his criticism, calling it “wrong and appalling.”

After Trump pulled American troops out of Syria and abandoned America’s Kurdish allies to slaughter, Romney delivered a blistering indictment of the administration’s betrayal on the Senate floor, saying, “What we have done to the Kurds will stand as a blood stain in the annals of American history.”

People assume that because Republicans have for the most part let Trump be Trump, they have no influence over him. But we saw recently that this isn’t true: Trump walked back the Doral G7 summit after Republicans expressed outrage. The right Republicans, in the right circumstances, can roll him.

Now circumstances are evolving to the point where Romney may be able to lead his colleagues to break with the administration if-- or rather when-- the president is impeached by the House.

Jeff Flake has speculated that 35 or more Republican senators might vote in an impeachment trial to remove Trump from office, but only if the vote were held in secret. Whatever the real number is, the senators face a collective-action problem. Politically, their safest bet is to move as one, announcing their openness to removal as a bloc. The president can say what he wants about this or that senator. But he wouldn’t be able to claim-- with any credibility beyond his most cultlike followers-- that a group composed of 10 or more Republican senators is just a cabal of dishonest, no-good losers secretly working for the Democrats.

Part of any collective-action problem is the disincentive to go first. Senators who want to vote against Trump will want to wait until the last minute, letting their more courageous colleagues take the political hit by going first. The senator going first might get hailed as a hero when the history books are written. But in the moment, he or she will be used as a human shield. It won’t be fun, and it’s a big ask for any sitting Republican.

Romney is best suited for the job. We already know, from The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins, that Romney is “taking the prospect of a Senate trial seriously-- he’s reviewing The Federalist Papers, brushing up on parliamentary procedure, and staying open to the idea that the president may need to be evicted from the Oval Office.” He’s not up for reelection until 2024, which gives him the maximum amount of leeway to make difficult votes. Even then, he represents Utah, a deep-red state where Trump’s approval rating has been underwater for much of his presidency. And that’s all assuming that Romney would even want to run for another six-year term at age 77. This all points to Romney as the perfect person to overcome the collective-action problem-- he has more stature and political capital than anyone else in the Senate, but he also has the least to lose.

The latest Quinnipiac poll, released yesterday, shows 12% of Republicans (and 64% of independents) disapprove of the way Trump is handling his job. 8% of Republicans and 57% of independents disapprove strongly. 6% of Republicans and 49% of independents have decided that Trump must be impeached and removed from office. And, there are no reputable polls showing anything different.


Trump's right about one thing: there aren't many Republicans left with enough of a sense of decency and patriotism to oppose him-- or maybe it's just that they lack intelligence. It is starting to grow though-- especially among young Republican voters. Almost a third of self-indentified Republicans under 30 now say they agree that Trump is unfit for office. More Republicans in Congress will follow as that number expands and they decide their own careers are in jeopardy.