Thank You for Your Servitude by Mark Leibovich

Author:Mark Leibovich [Leibovich, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2022-07-12T00:00:00+00:00

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I visited Romney in his hideaway office at the Capitol on the Wednesday morning of the Senate impeachment vote. He had agreed to give me advance word of his decision on the condition that I not report it until he started his floor speech a few hours later. This would allow me to write up a story in advance and put it online as soon as Romney took the floor, at around 2:00 p.m.

In the scheme of things, this was not the most earthshaking scoop of my career. I would essentially be alerting readers to something that would be revealed two or three minutes later, or however long it took for Romney to get to the point. But it was always satisfying to reveal something just a little bit early and then watch it careen around the internet. Even cooler was to have the cliff-hanger solved directly from the mouth of the human scum himself (a term of endearment from me, surely Romney understood).

Romney seemed genuinely unsure of his decision in the days leading up to the vote. If I had to predict, I’d probably have guessed he would vote not guilty, mostly because we’d seen this act before, too. Expecting a Republican to do the tough and right and uncomfortable thing in the face of Donald Trump was like betting on the Washington Generals. And for all his anguish and deliberation, this was still Mitt Romney, whose long rap sheet of political expedience had been exhaustively documented over many years and campaigns.

Romney sat on his hideaway couch, with bags of peanut M&M’s piled on a shelf. He greeted me with minimal chitchat and jumped right into Topic A. He said he would vote Trump guilty on the first count of impeachment, abuse of power.

He added a “not guilty” on the second count—obstruction of Congress—which came out like the afterthought that it was. What was significant was that Romney was willing to strike a clear blow against the volatile ruler of his party. He would become in fact the first U.S. senator in history to vote to remove a president of his own party: a flicker in the GOP’s moral darkness of the Trump years.

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