There are Republican officeholders who have devolved into little more than Twitter trolls and hot-take factories. But, again, each Republican should be judged on his or her own merits, and Trump support alone should not be sufficient for conservatives—even conservatives like me who are deeply grieved at Trump’s impact on the nation and the Republican Party—to disqualify them from public office.
And it’s not just because the alternative argument would require them to display historic courage. It’s because the alternative argument would also require them to defy their constituents—the people who put them in office—and in most cases completely immolate their careers.
We can (and should) stand and applaud the extraordinary courage of Mitt Romney without making it a mandatory precondition to maintaining federal office. I’ve said this before, and I’ll keep saying it. Vice often leaves virtue with few good options, and the GOP’s good senators have faced few good choices in these last four years.
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