A Senate Democrat said he was moved to tears by his Republican colleague Mitt Romney’s vote to remove President Trump from office and said he wants his children to emulate the Utah senator.
“I will tell you, Erin, there were tears in my eyes, and there are again as I hear him say those words,” Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Wednesday. “But what I thought is, I really would like my four children to be like that.”
Romney voted to convict President Trump on one article of impeachment, becoming the first U.S. senator to vote in favor of removing a president from his own party.
The Utah Republican was widely praised by liberal politicians and media figures for his decision.
“I think that Mitt Romney showed a great deal of courage, and I wish there were other Republicans that shared the same sense of decency,” Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, a 2020 presidential contender, said of Romney’s vote.
Blumenthal was a vocal supporter of impeachment and publicly urged House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to send the charges to the Senate earlier this month.
“History will sit in judgment of us, and the future of our republic will be in jeopardy if we fail tomorrow to do the right thing,” he said the day before voting to remove Trump from office.
Trump took a victory lap following the impeachment acquittal with a speech in the East Room of the White House on Thursday.
“They took nothing, they took a phone call that was a totally appropriate call,” the president said to a crowded room. “I call it a perfect call, because it was. And they brought me to the final stages of impeachment. But now, we have that gorgeous word, I never thought a word would sound so good. It’s called total acquittal. Total acquittal.”
