At the first closed-door party lunch since the impeachment trial, there wasn’t a single word uttered about Romney’s stunning decision to find Trump “guilty of an appalling abuse of the public trust.”

And despite some calls to kick Romney out of the Republican Conference and a fusillade of disses from the president himself, Romney was still on the leadership’s whip team and on Tuesday said in a brief interview that he had his “whip card out to whip another piece of legislation.”…

“The president’s going to do what he’s going to do. That’s his M.O. when it comes to politics, and that’s not going to change no matter what any of us think or feel,” Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) said. “But it won’t change [Romney’s] standing in the Senate.”

“Everybody understands that occasions are going to arise invariably where they are going to have to vote their conscience and it’s going to make them an outlier for the conference. I think we all respect that,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) said.