Choose your loyalties
Those 10 Republican representatives did
Yesterday, the House of Representatives voted, 232-197, to impeach Donald Trump for a second time, this time for inciting a deadly mob that attacked the Capitol one week earlier.
The for-impeachment voters included 10 Republican representatives, including the No. 3 elephant in the room, Rep. Liz Cheney, of Wyoming. Her announcement that she would vote to impeach carried extra weight for all kinds of reasons, not the least of which is her last name (a GOP legacy!) and her general bedrock conservatism. If you watched the hearings, you heard her name invoked by multiple Democrats pleading to their colleagues across the aisle.
In the long term, Cheney’s vote may benefit her career, though for now, she’s not the belle at the conservative ball. Some of her other pro-impeachment colleagues are also taking it in the teeth for what their states’ party faithful see as disloyalty to the clan.
Choosing one’s loyalties can be difficult, and you can’t spend much time pondering ethics without stumbling across Potter’s Box, created by Ralph B. Potter, Jr., Harvard Divinity School professor of social ethics emeritus. An ordained Presbyterian minister, Potter began studying how people make ethical choices as he pursued a doctorate during the Vietnam War. Over time, as he began to look at what might be a Christian response to nuclear proliferation, he found that people tend to make ethical decisions after taking four steps:
Obviously, at any point in the process, things can fall apart. To begin with, you may not have all the facts, or you may give up trying to find them. Box No. 2 implies you know enough about values to identify them — and for some, that may be a reach. The same goes with Box No. 3. In the last step, you should be able to identify your loyalties, but that involves at least some self-awareness.
Politicians have multiple loyalties. Don’t we all? But, given the stakes, politicians may have more loyalties than mere mortals. Politicians must weigh loyalties to their constituents (or so one would hope), their families (ditto), their political party (duh), their personal principles (I left this one for next-to-last, tee-hee), and, let’s be honest, they must have loyalties to getting re-elected, which isn’t precisely the same as loyalty to constituents.
Loyalty to the next election can sometimes seem to trump (sorry) other loyalties. Who wouldn’t want free parking in D.C., and access to fabulous wealth? That particular loyalty may explain some of the more rabid support of the current president, though “appealing to Trump’s base” in such an uncertain time supposes that the base is omniscient and impermeable.
When it came time to choosing loyalties on Wednesday, we won’t know (until everyone writes their tell-all) precisely what loyalty each representative weighed before the vote. We do know that things can get complicated. One representative who voted for impeachment, Tom Rice, of South Carolina, was among the 147 Republican Congresspeople who wanted to overturn the election the week before. Unlike some of the other pro-impeachment Republicans, Rice is not from a swing district, nor was he a loud critic of Trump. We anxiously await his tell-all.