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“ ‘We did not send him there to vote his conscience. We did not send him there to do the right thing or whatever he said he was doing. We sent him there to represent us.’ ”
That was David Ball, chair of the Republican Party in Washington County, Pa., criticizing Sen. Pat Toomey, a fellow Pennsylvania Republican, over his vote on Saturday to convict former president Donald Trump of inciting an insurrection against the U.S. Capitol.
Toomey was one of seven Republicans to vote with all Senate Democrats and independents to convict Trump. The vote on Trump’s conviction ran against the former president by a 57-43 margin, which fell short of the two-thirds majority needed.
Toomey has been censured by individual counties in Pennsylvania, but Ball is pushing for Republicans statewide to formally censure him over his impeachment vote. This has happened to fellow Republicans in recent days, with Sen. Bill Cassidy censured by Louisiana Republicans before the day was out on Saturday. Rep. Adam Kinzinger, who voted to impeach Trump in the House, was censured not only by a local Republican organization in north-central Illinois but by a group of relatives.
Censure is an act of a government entity or organization to publicly reprimand a government official via a formal statement. There are no formal consequences of a censure. Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic House speaker from California, shot down talk after the impeachment vote that Congress could pivot to a censure of the twice-acquitted Trump. Censures, she said, are for such violations as misusing congressional stationery, not inciting a deadly insurrection.
Toomey, explaining his vote on Saturday, said: “It was really the accumulation of the weight of all the evidence [that], I think, overwhelmingly argued in favor of conviction.”
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Prior to the impeachment trial, Toomey said he was retiring from the Senate when his term ends in 2022. “I did what I thought was right,” he said, “and I would certainly like to think that, regardless of my political circumstances or whether I was running for office again or not, I would do the same thing.”
