Mitt Romney was elected by the people of Utah as a Republican nominee for the Senate. He has a right to his place in the Republican Party.
I say this in light of the #ExpelMitt movement, which sparked into life on Twitter on Wednesday. The movement comes in response to Romney’s decision to vote to convict President Trump on the first impeachment charge leveled before him: abuse of power. President Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., is leading the expulsion movement. And, perhaps inspired by the title of his book, Trump Jr. seems rather triggered.
Mitt Romney is forever bitter that he will never be POTUS. He was too weak to beat the Democrats then so he’s joining them now.
He’s now officially a member of the resistance & should be expelled from the @GOP.
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) February 5, 2020
Trump Jr. followed up that tweet with four more tweets, including one which asserted that Romney should be “expelled from the GOP conference.”
No, he really shouldn’t be.
Don’t get me wrong; I recognize why many Republicans are furious over Romney’s vote. The vast majority of Republicans adore Trump and believe Romney has betrayed their hero. They fear, with good reason, that Romney’s vote will provide campaign ammunition to 2020 Democratic presidential candidates seeking to unseat Trump and buffer Democratic congressional leaders in their claims that the impeachment effort was about the rule of law, not partisanship.
But here’s the thing: the Senate is not the White House, Trump is not a sultan, and the GOP is not an autocracy.
Romney is not a White House staffer who serves at the president’s pleasure. Nor is he a Senate staffer who serves at Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s pleasure. He is a senator nominated by Utah Republican primary voters and elected by 665,215 Utah voters in November 2018.
We have often heard Republicans claim that impeaching Trump is about overturning the 2016 election. But if Trump’s supporters truly believe that, how can they justify their new demand that Romney be expelled from the GOP? Surely that repudiation of the will of Utah voters would be just the same as that which they say Democrats are trying to do to Trump?
There’s a broader concern here: the nature of the GOP as a party. The Grand Old Party is not the Trump Old Party. It was formed 92 years before Trump was even born. To, therefore, assume that disloyalty to Trump is cause for party expulsion, as the #ExpelMitt movement necessarily assumes, is to forget history and heritage. More than that, it is to subjugate the party to the whims of one man and his family. That is a presumption at once autocratic and absurdly un-American.
By all means, passionately oppose Romney’s vote. By all means, don’t invite him to the Conservative Political Action Conference. By all means, organize a primary challenge against him in 2024. By all means, don’t vote for him ever again.
But don’t expel him from the party. He has every right to be a member.
