Mitt Romney will vote to remove a president of his own party from office mere minutes before President Trump becomes the third president acquitted in an impeachment trial. Democrats, who spent the entirety of the 2012 presidential election smearing the then-Republican nominee as a greedy sexist, have unsurprisingly found a strange new respect for Romney, but the Utah senator is no partisan, and his rationale behind splitting his vote between the two articles of impeachment provide a model for other independent senators wishing to vote on principle, not partisanship.

Romney described his decision to vote to convict Trump on the charge of abuse of power as the “most difficult” of his life. He cited Federalist 65 in his defense of removing a president from office on the basis of a nonstatutory abuse of power and said he sorely wished that exculpatory evidence arose to ameliorate his judgment that Trump was guilty.