Mitt Romney Tells Us That His Party No Longer Believes in the Constitution
And that many of the people serving in Congress need to retire
Mitt Romney is not someone I would vote for, probably ever. And yet an excerpt from an upcoming biography about Romney by McKay Coppins appeared in The Atlantic recently. For a brief moment, I was sad that I never had a chance to better evaluate the man and his position.
What turned me off the most was when he criticized Obama’s health care proposal, which was in many ways a retread of the one he implemented in Massachusetts. He was trying to gain points with the lunatic fringe of his party, and so he abandoned his own values.
That is why, for as honest, intelligent, and even patriotic as this man is, he hadn’t been able to win over a majority of American voters. No one likes a waffler, and the moment you sell your own success out to gain cheap points, it dooms you. Romney even had me laughing:
“Every time Donald Trump makes a strong argument, I’d say, ‘Remind me again about the Clorox,’ ” Romney told me [Coppins]. “Every now and then, I would cough and go, ‘Clorox.’ (What Mitt Romney Saw in the Senate) ”
Romney has recently announced that he will not seek re-election.
Romney, 76, says he will not run for reelection. Pelosi plans to run again, but not as Speaker Following her example, House Majority Leader Steny (D-Md.) Hoyer and Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) have stepped aside, too.
Romney believes Joe Biden, 80, and Donald Trump, 77, should also make way for the next generation.
“The times we’re living in really demand the next generation to step up and to express their point of view, and to make the decisions that will shape American politics over the coming century,” he said after his announcement. “And just having a bunch of guys that were around, the baby boomers who were around in the post-war era, we’re not the right ones to be making the decisions for tomorrow (Congress Needs to Follow Mitt’s Example).”
Romney was brutally honest with his biographer. He wasn’t speaking to historians in the future, trying to confuse them about who he was. He wasn’t listening to the more vain parts of his ego that would have preferred that Mitt do some damage control with the Party he was a member of his whole life. Romney was cranky, wise, and at times funny.
His claim that many members of the Republican Party no longer feel any sense of duty to preserve and protect the Constitution was something I think most of us who are not Republicans have known for quite some time now. Romney says the way to vote for most in his Party is how that vote will affect their chances of being re-elected. In what he called a “club for old guys,” the Senators adored their free lunches, the barber, and the 24-hour, on-call doctors.
And he sensed that many of his colleagues attached an enormous psychic currency to their position — that they would do almost anything to keep it. “Most of us have gone out and tried playing golf for a week, and it was like, ‘Okay, I’m gonna kill myself,’ ” he told me. Job preservation, in this context, became almost existential. Retirement was death. The men and women of the Senate might not need their government salary to survive, but they needed the stimulation, the sense of relevance, the power. One of his new colleagues told him that the first consideration when voting on any bill should be “Will this help me win reelection?” (The second and third considerations, the colleague continued, should be what effect it would have on his constituents and his state (What Mitt Romney Saw in the Senate).
Romney was shocked to learn how many Republican Senators absolutely loathed Trump. Still, again, solely for protecting their jobs, they smiled, waved, back-slapped, and basked in the glow of Trump’s high approval ratings with Republican voters. In one genuinely amazing moment never reported, Trump came to the Senate Republicans’ weekly caucus lunch. The Mueller report had failed to link him directly to the Russians, and Trump received a raucous standing ovation from the Senate Republicans. He then proceeded in stream-of-consciousness form to jump from one topic to another. He called the Republican Party the “party of health care” and made other such wild pronouncements.
Trump exited the room, and after it was learned he had exited the building, the entire Republican Senate caucus burst into laughter. Romney was astounded. In private, his Republican colleagues rooted for Trump’s downfall. Still, in public, they supported him often passionately and willfully, lying and sabotaging work with their Democratic colleagues to gain favor with Trump. In almost complete agreement, Republicans knew that Trump was the worst thing for the country and the free world, but if it meant helping them get re-elected, then so be it.
Federalist №65 instructs Senators that the moment the House has impeached a president, it is imperative to set aside all partisan issues and act as impartial jurors when determining the president’s guilt or innocence. Mitch McConnell, who Romney found to be one of the most two-faced in the Senate, called together the caucus and invited Vice President Pence to instruct them on voting.
At the next meeting, McConnell told his colleagues they should understand that the upcoming trial was not really a trial at all. “This is a political process,” he said — and it was thus appropriate for them to behave like politicians (What Mitt Romney Saw in the Senate).
Romney’s decision not to run anymore came from an epiphany he had one day when assessing how J.D. Vance, the author of Hillbilly Elegy, had transformed himself overnight from an intelligent conservative who had put forth good ideas about how to help working Americans without resorting to Trumpism into a card-carrying Trumpist. Romney realized that the Josh Hawley, Ron Johnson, and J.D. Vance mold was the future of the Republican Party.
Then, in 2021, Vance decided he wanted to run for Senate and reinvented his entire persona overnight. Suddenly, he was railing against the “childless left,” denouncing Indigenous Peoples’ Day as a “fake holiday,” and accusing Joe Biden of manufacturing the opioid crisis “to punish people who didn’t vote for him (What Mitt Romney Saw in the Senate).”
Suddenly, the glue for Republicans was not what was best for the country or working families but what was the most ridiculous, extremist position that would guarantee job security for decades by being selected by a handful of Foxified, ignorant American fascists.
Romney warns that world history has been telling the same story over and over for millennia. No matter how advanced or powerful a civilization may have been, one sick and corrupted individual comes onto the scene and awakens the cowardly.
“Authoritarianism is like a gargoyle lurking over the cathedral, ready to pounce,” Romney said.