During the fake impeachment trial, Chief Justice John Roberts reminded everyone that they were inhabiting “the world’s greatest deliberative body,” a description of the Senate that would be hilarious if it weren’t so detestably at odds with reality. Spineless Republicans sabotaged their consciences, violated their oaths as jurors, and guzzled from the demagogue’s goblet.

All but one.

Mitt Romney has been on the national scene long enough to take heat from all sides. As a 2012 presidential candidate eager to appease the Republican right, he pulled a lot of switcheroos, dumping the centrist policies he’d championed as governor of Massachusetts, and I, like many observers, took notice. To quote myself back in the day, “Romney can make a weather vane look like the Rock of Gibraltar.”

And his core beliefs about Donald Trump have sometimes seemed fungible. He sought Trump’s endorsement of his candidacy in 2012, and when he finally got it, he called it “a delight,” and gushed that he was “honored.” Four years later, however, Romney warned Republicans that “Trump is a phony, a fraud…He’s playing the members of the American people for suckers…He has neither the temperament nor the judgment to be president.” But two years after that, when Romney was running for the Senate in 2018, he played down his ’16 critique and lauded Trump’s policies as “pretty effective.” He did add one important caveat: “Where there’s a place where I disagree, I point that out.”

He cashed in that caveat yesterday, in his speech on the Senate floor. And, by implication, he shamed his cowed Republican colleagues:

This verdict is ours to render. The people will judge us for how well and faithfully we fulfilled our duty. The grave question the Constitution tasks senators to answer is whether the President committed an act so extreme and egregious that it rises to the level of a “high crime and misdemeanor.“

Yes, he did.

The President asked a foreign government to investigate his political rival. The President withheld vital military funds from that government to press it to do so. The President delayed funds for an American ally at war with Russian invaders. The President’s purpose was personal and political.

Accordingly, the President is guilty of an appalling abuse of the public trust.

What he did was not “perfect.” No, it was a flagrant assault on our electoral rights, our national security interests, and our fundamental values. Corrupting an election to keep oneself in office is perhaps the most abusive and destructive violation of one’s oath of office that I can imagine.

Romney’s vote to convict changes nothing, of course. Thanks to Trump’s Republican supplicants, who quake in fear of being trolled on Twitter and abused on Fox News, the flagrant assaulter of our electoral rights and fundamental values has been unleashed to run rampant on a whim. But Romney’s historic decision – as the first senator to ever convict a president of his own party – was hugely significant. It spoke truth to power. It spoke to future generations.

And it took guts. Granted, he’s not up for re-election until 2024; in that sense, his conviction vote was a safe vote. But that won’t shield him from the wrath of the mob (Donald Trump, Jr. says Romney should be thrown out of the Senate Republican caucus). So when the chips were down, and the cowards dove for cover, Romney stood up. Indeed, this speech passage put his party colleagues to shame, particularly the gutless wonders (Susan Collins, Lamar Alexander, Lisa Murkowski, Joni Ernst) who’ve done somersaults to justify their votes to acquit:

In the last several weeks, I have received numerous calls and texts. Many demand that, in their words, “I stand with the team.” I can assure you that that thought has been very much on my mind. I support a great deal of what the President has done. I have voted with him 80% of the time. But my promise before God to apply impartial justice required that I put my personal feelings and biases aside. Were I to ignore the evidence that has been presented, and disregard what I believe my oath and the Constitution demands of me for the sake of a partisan end, it would, I fear, expose my character to history’s rebuke and the censure of my own conscience.

The MAGA minions are already hurling their epithets – Breitbart News calls Romney “a bitter sanctimonious weasel”; Lou Dobbs says he’s a traitor – thus further lowering this nation’s median IQ. But the rest of us are grateful that at least someone in the Republican ranks struck a match and lit up the darkness. May it illuminate the way forward.