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Committee rebukes senator for Trump impeachment vote
A sharply split Republican State Committee in Pennsylvania voted Monday night to again express its displeasure with Sen. Pat Toomey’s vote last month to convict former President Donald J. Trump on an article of impeachment, but stopped short of voting to censure him.
Committee members were given the choice of voting for a statement proposed by Chairperson Lawrence Tabas that “strongly rebukes but does not censure” Toomey, and a second statement that does censure him.
The censure movement was blocked by a narrow 128-124 margin, with 13 abstentions, according to a person who was briefed on the results.
The difference is essentially a matter of severity in the reprimand. Neither option carried any real teeth with regard to Toomey’s office or standing within the party. The second-term senator from the Lehigh Valley already has announced his intent to leave the Senate at the end of his term in 2022.
But some members of the committee — and the broader party membership — who hope to see the party steer away from blind devotion to the former president, with gubernatorial and U.S. Senate races on the horizon in Pennsylvania next year, may see the lesser rebuke as a small sign of progress.
Toomey was one of seven Republican senators to vote to convict Trump for incitement of his supporters to riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Toomey was part of a 57-43 majority that fell 10 votes short of the two-thirds threshold needed to convict.
Several county Republican committees, including Northampton, have already passed censure resolutions, but other committee members, like state Rep. Sue Helm of Dauphin County, said Monday the infighting makes no sense to her.
“Instead of wasting our time on this,” Helm said, “I think we should be looking for a new and good candidate for when he [Toomey] isn’t going to run in two years.”
Monday’s vote seeks to wrap up a discussion launched in a virtual meeting Feb. 24 that ended without a completed vote after the platform the committee was using crashed.
The censure vote was seen differently by different groups.
To some, it was like an exhibition season for the fights ahead in 2022, as the party tries to settle on nominees for an open gubernatorial and Senate races, and, in a larger sense, its post-Trump direction.
Others saw it simply as those in power taking control of internal party politics. They are counting on Biden and his thin Democratic majorities in Congress to stumble and help reunite the GOP.
Some members went on record in advance of last week’s private discussion to express concerns about the effort to punish Toomey alienating another slice of existing party members and making it harder to reach new ones.
“The Republican Party needs unity, not a purge,” Joseph DiSarro, a political science professor at Washington & Jefferson College, who also is a member of the Republican State Committee, said last month.
“The last thing the party needs is a discussion of who is a true Republican, and who is a RINO,” DiSarro said, using the acronym for Republican In Name Only.