‘It shows extraordinary political courage on his part…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) A once-reviled political opponent of former President Barack Obama is now being doted upon by liberal media and other Democrats.
No, it isn’t John McCain.
Unlike the late Arizona senator, whose betrayal on Obamacare repeal helped lionize him in the eyes of the Left shortly before his passing, Sen. Mitt Romney, R-Utah, needed only to be elected into Congress in order to receive the adulation of those who trashed him seven short years ago.
Buzzfeed—the far left ‘news’ site best known for its clickbait quizzes, cat pictures, embarrassing retractions and publishing the leaked Steele Dossier—has already predetermined, without evidence, that Donald Trump stands guilty of whatever Democrats eventually accuse him of.
Thus, following his foregone impeachment in the U.S. House (where a majority of partisan Democrats now support it), the website cast its gave to the Senate, where 20 Republican defectors are needed to remove the president.
“Any prayer for a shred of Republican support for impeachment begins with Mitt Romney … who tried and utterly failed to kill Trump’s campaign in 2016, flirted with joining Trump’s cabinet after the election, and has since maintained a wary position on the president,” wrote the site.
Indeed, the freshman senator and former Massachusetts governor has been an important leader in the NeverTrump movement and a GOP foil, contrasting Trump’s blunt and abrasive pragmatism with a scolding, Pollyannish rectitude—which proved to be no match for the Democratic machine in 2012.
While many conservatives rallied around the president and pointed at the glaring holes in its contrived case for impeachment, Romney called “deeply troubling” the allegations that Trump abused power by asking the Ukrainian president for support in two crucial investigations against Democrats.
The website noted that Romney broke from GOP colleagues by saying that Trump’s asking for an investigation into allegations of corruption surrounding former Vice President Joe Biden was wrong, even if there were no evidence that Trump was using military aid as leverage to coerce it.
Ironically, Buzzfeed followed up by offering praise for Romney from a left-wing senator who, himself, asked the Ukraine to investigate Trump under similar circumstances.
“It shows extraordinary political courage on his part, and I’ve told him so,” said Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., who further claimed that other Republicans were holding back not because there was any valid reason but “because they’re afraid of [Trump].”
Another of the signatories to the Democrats’ letter to Ukraine, Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., lauded Romney’s bipartisan spirit as a throwback to the glory days of Congress when he began in 1975—a year after Republican and Democrat cooperation forced President Richard Nixon to resign.
As it was then, of course, ‘bipartisanship’ to the current Senate Democrats remains a one-way street going in their direction.
Romney, who has broken rank on several votes already to rebuke Trump, said he was waiting to see where the House investigation led before deciding whether to remove the president.
Although he, himself, had already decided how to vote, Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, said he empathized with Romney for wanting to reserve judgment—not to ascertain what the facts may be, but in order to protect himself politically.
“We don’t want to create a situation where this becomes purely a question of which team you belong to,” Schatz said. “If people need to take a little longer or have to massage their own home state politics to get to the right place, we have to allow them to get there.”
The article continued to suggest that Republicans who crossed Trump to side with Democrats were heroic, but those who then went against the Left were cowardly for doing so, rather than following their convictions.
It cited as an example Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, famously a centrist, who joined McCain in voting against the Obamacare repeal only to ‘betray’ her new Democrat friends by voting for tax cuts and the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Collins gave a lengthy speech outlining her reasoning for purely objective purposes after the Kavanaugh vote.
Regardless, she “has been loudly criticized on the left ever since,” said Buzzfeed, adding that she “clearly felt this pressure” to fall in line with Trump.
There is little doubt that Romney’s flirtation with the Left—whether it leads him to vote for or against removing the president—will just as quickly be forgotten in their memories as his political legacy may be to the annals of history.