I knew what the vote could cost me. I was a Republican member of Congress from a district Trump had carried easily. Voting to impeach a Republican president was not a good way to protect my future in Republican politics, and I knew that before I cast my vote to impeach him.
I still did it anyway. I had no other choice.
A president had lost an election, spent months lying about the result, pressured officials to help him stay in power, and then watched his supporters attack the Capitol while Congress was trying to certify the winner. I could not see myself looking back on that and saying, “I knew all of that, but voting to impeach would have been bad for my career.”
So I voted yes, because if we’re going to ask young people to be willing to die for America, then we have to be willing to take tough votes that may cost us our job. My oath to the Constitution required me to impeach Donald Trump, and that was the only job that mattered when our darkest hours arrived.
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Here’s what I keep coming back to after all these years: when you’re sworn into Congress, you don’t swear an oath to your party, your donors, or your own reelection. You swear an oath to the Constitution that doesn’t come with an asterisk in times when it isn’t politically convenient to follow. It doesn’t pause during an election year. It just asks whether you’ll do the job you promised to do, especially when doing it costs you something.
That’s the part I want people to actually think about, not just about me, but about this exact moment. Doing the right thing when it’s unpopular isn’t just a nice idea for a civics class. It’s the only thing that separates a country of laws from a country that just does whatever the most powerful person in the room wants that day. Every person who’s ever been involved in a democracy’s survival has done something that cost them at a moment when it would have been so much easier not to do anything at all.
There were plenty of people who took the “easy route” and didn’t vote to impeach Trump after the insurrection. They each came up with their own excuses. But the problem is that Trump’s behavior itself was inexcusable. What he lied about and encouraged his supporters to do was as disqualifying an action as you’d find for someone serving as President of the United States.
This wasn’t a policy disagreement dressed up as a constitutional crisis. Some of my colleagues told me privately it was obvious that “of course this crossed a line” or that “of course the vote was right.” Then they walked onto the floor and voted no anyway. I’ve thought about that more than almost anything else from those weeks. It wasn’t that they disagreed. It’s that agreeing and acting on it were two different things, and only one of those was ever going to cost them anything.
I think about that distinction a lot now, because the same test hasn’t gone away. It just shows up in smaller, quieter rooms than the House floor, like a manager who watches an employee get scapegoated and says nothing because it isn’t his fight. Or a school board member who won’t say what she actually believes in front of an angry crowd. The instinct to protect yourself first is the same instinct, whether the stakes are a presidency or a paycheck.
But one day, those who took the easy route out in the final weeks of the first Trump Administration will stare in the mirror and they will be forced to realize that they left principle on the table. They will realize that we can’t reward leadership for assaults on our institutions with a blind eye, or even worse, an apathetic one. That undercuts every level of service and sacrifice from the generations of Americans who have given their all to give us today.
That’s the actual threat now — not that people don’t see the problems with Trump, but that they’ve decided it’s easier not to. Whether for political, personal, or professional expediency, they’ve debated themselves into delusion that he is a different person than he once was.
I’ve never had to debate it. I knew that impeachment was the right thing then and if I went back in time I’d do it all over again. No doubt.
