After a two-year love affair with any nominal Republican willing to buck the party line dictated by Donald Trump, the media are ready to be shocked that Sen. Mitt Romney, the devout Mormon and fiscal conservative, actually doesn’t plan on rubber-stamping the most liberal presidential administration in history.
No, the maverick Utah senator does not exactly condone signing on to a $1.9 trillion coronavirus spending package full of left-wing party favors just after Trump passed a $900 billion relief bill on top of a nearly $27 trillion national debt. Unless you locked yourself into a multiyear echo chamber where the unemployed political consultants staffing the Lincoln Project are your idea of conservative, Romney’s recalcitrance should jar no one.
Romney never stopped being conservative. It was the Republican Party that decided to do that. Trump, the lifelong Democrat famous for boasting about his sexual prowess while cheating on his multiple wives and partying with Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein, took the reins of the party and made a calculated choice to expunge it of fiscal discipline. Although Romney condemned Trump’s ethical failings, he was never going to start voting for liberal policies just to spite the Bad Orange Man.
Romney is a 73-year-old multimillionaire who looks about two decades younger. He has a stunning family, with some two dozen grandchildren and a storied resume. His choice to serve in the Senate was spurred by a sense of patriotism and principle, not the feckless greed of the warmongering political consultants who quickly rebranded themselves into Democratic bootlickers the moment they realized the GOP no longer had a place for professional losers.
Sure, as an established GOP figure and senator in the game out of a pure sense of duty, Romney knew that he could lambast Trump in ways that other Republicans couldn’t. And given Romney’s love of the institution, he will surely engage in amicable and productive discussions with President Biden. But if you think being a principled conservative means he’s actually just a Democrat, you’re in for a long four years.
