Thank you, Sen. Mitt Romney, for your open eyes and ethical fortitude.

I am a registered member of the Republican party. I voted for John McCain and Romney when they ran for president and Romney when he ran for senator. I also like to believe I can look at reality without political blinders on.

Romney, recently calling himself a “ renegade Republican ” appears to be the only Republican lawmaker on Capitol Hill willing to take his Trump blinders off to comment on some of the president’s most outrageous behavior, including the diet of lies the president feeds us, his efforts to undermine those who seek the truth and his maliciously divisive and racist rhetoric.

Republican lawmakers, like the rest of us, can easily verify, through non-partisan fact checking , that Trump has reached unprecedented heights of achievement with respect to the volume and brazenness of his verifiably false and misleading statements. At least Romney comments on the president’s behavior while other Republican legislators prefer to avert their gaze or perpetuate Trump’s alternative universe.

Republican lawmakers can also read the Mueller report, and reading just a few pages of Part II makes Trump’s assertions that the report exonerates him from any attempt to obstruct justice clearly ludicrous.

Romney affirmed there were troubling revelations about the president’s behavior pointed out in the report and validated the report, in contrast to intense efforts by Trump and his minions in and outside of the congress to discredit Robert Mueller and discredit the findings of the intelligence community.

The president’s divisive, sometimes racist, and absurd statements can be seen by our republican lawmakers in real time also, and Romney at least comments on some of the most egregious, such as the senator’s comment on the racist statements made by Trump most recently . (Or is there something more this week?)

Of course, Romney gets attacked by the Trump machine when he speaks out, but he does not seem to be nearly as cowed as his Republican colleagues who apparently choose to put their sleep masks on and cower under the covers in response to the president’s outrageous behavior.

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J. Alan Gift