Perhaps as importantly, in making the announcement, Romney laid waste to some of the GOP’s favorite — and often strained — defenses of Trump.

Romney has now nullified one of the GOP’s favorite talking points during the impeachment trial: that this was the first purely partisan impeachment process in our nation’s history. That was only kind of true in the House, where one Republican who backed impeachment initially (Justin Amash) left the party. Now we have a member of the president’s own party voting to not just impeach, but to remove him.

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(Romney told Post chief political correspondent Dan Balz he will not vote to convict Trump on the second article of impeachment, obstruction of Congress.)

That a member of the president’s own party is taking such a vote is actually unprecedented. Both Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton saw some of their fellow Democrats in the House vote to impeach them, but both of them kept their party completely in line when it came to the Senate. In that way, Trump’s impeachment is actually now historically bipartisan.

Romney also repeatedly — and almost systematically — picked apart some of the arguments the GOP made on Trump’s behalf. In announcing his decision, he plainly rebutted what his fellow Republicans have strained against logic and facts to believe about Trump’s intentions with regard to Ukraine.

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For instance: “There’s no question that were their names not Biden, the president would never have done what he did.”

Republicans have sought to argue that perhaps Trump was just truly interested in rooting out corruption in Ukraine. They have done so even though he has shown little interest in other forms of corruption, whether in Ukraine or elsewhere, and that the only two investigations he asked for carried obvious personal political benefits. They have also done so despite Trump only launching this effort as it became clear Biden might be his strongest 2020 rival.

Romney in the interview with Balz added that Trump “did so for a political purpose, and that he pressured Ukraine to get them to help or to lead in this effort. My own view is that there’s not much I can think of that would be a more egregious assault on our Constitution than trying to corrupt an election to maintain power.”

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Over the past week, a series of Republicans led by Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) have said what Trump did was wrong but not worthy of removal. They basically said the bar for such an offense was so high that, even if Trump did exactly what Democrats say he did, it is just not that bad. It was not even close enough for them to want to find out more about the situation by calling additional witnesses like former national security adviser John Bolton, who could ostensibly have revealed the situation to be even worse than currently known.

Romney, by contrast, took that argument and set it ablaze, arguing that gaming the electoral process to maintain power is the very definition of corruption. He even said Trump’s actions are “what autocrats do in tinhorn countries.”

The GOP has also argued the Bidens might have actually done something wrong in Ukraine — and thus Trump’s request for investigation was perhaps valid. Romney also took that on. He said the potential conflict of interest in Hunter Biden working for a Ukrainian energy company was “a matter of judgment, but it’s not a crime.” He said Hunter Biden “got a lot of money for his father’s name. That’s unsavory. But again, it’s not a crime.”

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Nor was Romney impressed with the idea that impeachment should have been shoved aside in favor of letting the voters decide in November, given it is an election year.

“The Constitution doesn’t say that if the president did something terribly wrong, let the people decide in the next election what should happen,” he said. “It says if the president does something terribly wrong, the Senate shall try him. And so the Constitution is plain.”

There is indeed no exception in the Constitution for election years. Senators like Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) have argued that even if a president’s actions are impeachable and worthy of removal, that doesn’t mean the Senate has to resort to being the arbiter. Romney pretty explicitly rejected that and said it was the Senate’s job to check the president, regardless of the timing.

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So that is basically four signature GOP defenses of Trump in the impeachment process that Romney directly rejected. He could have taken to the Senate floor and watered down his case, perhaps saying the Biden stuff was legitimate or that Trump’s motives might have been at least somewhat pure, as other Republicans have. But he opted to directly and repeatedly rebut the defense his own party has provided throughout this process.