Sen. Pat Toomey (R-PA) can join the club for Republican senators who are now paying the price at home for daring to hold ex-President Donald Trump accountable after he encouraged a mob of his supporters to storm the Capitol last month.
Local CBS affiliate KDKA reports that Pennsylvania’s Lawrence, Washington, York, and Centre County GOP committees have censured the senator, who will not run for reelection in 2022, for voting to convict Trump in the Senate impeachment trial on Saturday or for voting to allow the trial to proceed in the first place.
Jeff Piccola, the chair of the York County Committee, told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that his committee “no longer recognizes [Toomey] as a creditable representative of our party.”
The Clarion County Republican Committee stated in its resolution to censure the senator that convicting Trump was a “purely self-serving vindictive and punitive action by those with establishment political objectives,” according to KDKA.
Toomey, who was also one of the handful of GOP senators who had voted that the impeachment trial was constitutional before the final vote, said in a statement on Saturday that “for the first time in American history, the transfer of presidential power was not peaceful” thanks to Trump.
“I was one of the 74 million Americans who voted for President Trump, in part because of the many accomplishments of his administration. Unfortunately, his behavior after the election betrayed the confidence millions of us placed in him,” the lawmaker said. “His betrayal of the Constitution and his oath of office required conviction.”
Several of the other six Republican senators who crossed party lines to convict Trump are also coming under fire by their states’ GOP chapters: Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA) was censured by the Louisiana Republican Party shortly after the vote on Saturday, and the North Carolina GOP is poised to censure Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC) on Monday night.
Additionally, the Bangor Daily News reports that Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) is facing potential censure from her party in Maine.
The wave of retribution against the senators signal how a majority of the GOP remains in lockstep with the ex-president despite his incitement of a violent siege of the Capitol building on January 6, which left five people dead.
Ultimately, Trump was acquitted in the trial when the Senate failed to meet the 67 vote threshold needed to convict him after 43 Republicans sided with the ex-president.
