Principle and partisanship

Confusion reigns across our land because of a couple of isolated incidents of personal principle or individual thinking.

A few people made carefully considered judgments last week that fell outside the bounds of modern partisan injunction against exercises of integrity or at least objectivity.

U.S. Sen. Mitt Romney, who can seem a tad unctuous at times, rose to invite rage and ridicule.

He said he simply had to do what he believed to be right. He said history and his grandchildren demanded it. He said he’d vote to convict on one count of impeachment—abuse of power—the president, of his party, Donald Trump.

You could say that Romney did it because he bore old personal grievances against Trump.

You could say he did it because he wanted to be praised on MSNBC.

But that belies his emotional recitation of his sound reasoning. It belies his unwillingness to criticize anyone or anything other than the presidential action he found to be an abuse of power.

It belies the more powerful consideration that he knew he would be ridiculed by a vast modern conservative network that draws its lifeblood from vilification and vulgarity.

Within hours, Donald Trump Jr. was posting on social media to call Romney a female body part. It was the one his daddy is apt to grab.

In Arkansas, Trumpian Republicans were finding it simply unfathomable that Romney would think for himself outside the prevailing restrictions of partisan imprisonment.

A Republican official in Clark County named Eddie Arnold told this newspaper: “His vote was to remove a popular Republican president who has had success despite relentless socialist Democratic opposition. … That’s unforgivable in my book.”

Arnold disregarded entirely the issue of impeachable conduct—meaning the point—to consider only a president he agrees with and celebrates.

Lt. Gov. Tim Griffin said in the same article: “Sen. Romney should focus on supporting President Trump’s conservative policies that are strengthening our country.”

Indeed, Romney should so focus, and probably will, when the matter pending on the Senate floor is one of conservative policy that strengthens the country. In this case, though, the matter on the floor was one of constitutional responsibility.

Trump was formally accused of abuse of power based on well-established, indeed unrefuted, specificity of fact. Romney had sworn an oath to consider the matter impartially. It turned out that he found the charge simply accurate and serious enough to warrant removal from office.

Meanwhile, there were a few people identified as tending to the left—me, for one, and including columnist Ruth Marcus in The Washington Post—who committed the sin of counter-intuitive thinking on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s high-profile ripping of her copy of Trump’s State of the Union speech.

We found her action an exercise in poor judgment. We saw it as taking Trump’s bait to descend, not to his subterranean level, but needlessly toward it. We thought she essentially deflected more essential criticism of Trump on a much wider array of far more serious affronts.

Marcus wrote much to that effect in a Thursday column. I’d said the same thing the day before in social media posts, eliciting knee-jerk liberal anger and intolerance.

Many said Pelosi’s demonstration was vital to resist the blatant lies in Trump’s speech. Nearly everyone said the obvious that he’d done much worse.

I would have had the Democrats offer a live and real response to Trump’s speech—rather than the pre-packaged pablum of that Michigan governor—and declare and demonstrate in it Trump’s blatant lie on pre-existing conditions, an issue that actually matters to people instead of merely to a couple of Beltway egos.

Pelosi was better two days later at the National Prayer Breakfast, speaking only in lofty principle against persecution. Trump obsessed per usual on his own smallness and resentment, then engaged in rambling self-celebration at the White House.

One fellow told me last week I was spending entirely too much time lately on “bothsides-ism.”

I lately have said that Democrats have but one vital job, which is beating the disgrace that is Trump, and that they fail daily.

They can’t design a winning congressional tactic. They can’t field a strong presidential candidate. They can’t put on a caucus and count the votes.

If they were Uber, everyone would need a cab.

They are at great risk of being overtaken by a person who inspires voters and contributors but is a garden-variety democratic socialist who almost assuredly can’t beat Trump.

So let me proudly repeat my recent “both-sides-ism” refrain: The crisis in this country is two-fold. It is Republican enabling of Trump’s atrocity, and it is Democratic ineptitude, including Pelosi’s little flourish the other evening.