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As much of the political world now knows, Sen. Mitt Romney spoke at great length with The Atlantic’s McKay Coppins for a book that will be out next month, and a lengthy excerpt was published online this week that generated a lot of attention. It’s well worth your time, though there was one element that stuck with me after reading it.
The retiring Utah senator told Coppins about routine reluctance among GOP members to hold Donald Trump accountable for wrongdoing, largely because they feared a political backlash. “But,” Coppins wrote, “after January 6, a new, more existential brand of cowardice had emerged.”
One Republican congressman confided to Romney that he wanted to vote for Trump’s second impeachment, but chose not to out of fear for his family’s safety. The congressman reasoned that Trump would be impeached by House Democrats with or without him — why put his wife and children at risk if it wouldn’t change the outcome? Later, during the Senate trial, Romney heard the same calculation while talking with a small group of Republican colleagues. When one senator, a member of leadership, said he was leaning toward voting to convict, the others urged him to reconsider. You can’t do that, Romney recalled someone saying. Think of your personal safety, said another. Think of your children. The senator eventually decided they were right.
Romney was dismayed by the perspective, though he understood it at a personal level: In the wake of the insurrectionist attack on the Capitol, the book excerpt added, the senator shelled out $5,000 a day “to cover private security for his family.”
It’s not clear exactly how long that level of security continued — it might still be in place now — but for context, it’s worth noting that $5,000 a day is roughly $1.8 million a year.
If Romney’s version of behind-closed-door events is accurate, it’s an extraordinary peek into a deep pathology. In a healthy society with a stable political system, elected officials don’t cast votes out of fear that their families might be killed.
For all the recent Republican hysterics about “banana republics“ and “third-world“ countries, it was in the United States where GOP members of Congress were assessing threats of violence when making calculations about how best to vote.
This didn’t happen in the distant past, before the United States developed into a preeminent global superpower. By Romney’s telling, it happened just two years ago.
What’s more, according to the retiring GOP senator, members of his party wanted to cast principled votes, but they ultimately decided against it — because they feared violence.
Worse, these fears were not necessarily paranoid or irrational given recent events.
In a functioning democracy, this simply is not supposed to happen. Coppins added, “How long can a democracy last when its elected leaders live in fear of physical violence from their constituents?”
That need not be a rhetorical question.