PA County GOP Official Lashes Out at Pat Toomey for Voting to Convict Trump: We Did Not Send Him to DC to ‘Do the Right Thing or Whatever’

One country Republican Party official from Pennsylvania expressed his disgust with Sen. Pat Toomey (R) for his vote to convict former President Donald Trump in a telling and perhaps unintentionally revealing attack line.

During a Monday evening report from Pittsburgh’s local CBS affiliate, KDKA, Washington County GOP chair Dave Ball lashed out at Toomey, who is retiring in 2022, saying that Pennsylvania voters did not elect him to “vote his conscience” or “do the right thing or whatever.”

Ball’s angry response alluded to Toomey’s Saturday statement explaining his Senate impeachment trial vote, where he joined six other Republicans and 50 Democrats to find Trump guilty of inciting the Capitol insurrection. It was the largest, bipartisan coalition in U.S. history to vote for convicting a president on an impeachment charge. Just days before the vote, Senator Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) had indicated he would not be whipping votes to oppose Trump’s conviction, letting Senators vote their conscience.

“For the first time in American history, the transfer of presidential power was not peaceful,” Toomey said of the violent assault on Jan. 6. “I did what I thought was right and I would certainly like to think that regardless of my political circumstances or whether I was running for office again or not I would do the same thing.”

Toomey’s decision has not gone down well among the party faithful, though, just as other GOP Senators have faced a backlash at home. Numerous local and state Republican Parties have publicly rebuked GOP members of Congress who broke with their party on the impeachment conviction vote, with those in Louisiana and North Carolina having already censured Republican Senators who sided with the Democrats. Pennsylvania’s state GOP has likewise issued a statement saying it was disappointed in Toomey’s vote.

That move by the state party, however, didn’t go far enough for Ball’s county party or the county GOP in nearby Westmoreland County, both of which plan to formally censure Toomey.

But it was Ball’s pithy attack on Toomey’s discharge of his Senate duties that was the most notable.

“We did not send him there to vote his conscience. We did not send him there to do the right thing or whatever he said he was doing,” Ball said, offering a stridently partisan view of democratic representation. “We sent him there to represent us.”

“This is a matter of magnitude beyond a simple up or down vote on some trade policy or something,” Westmoreland County GOP chair Bill Bretz added.

Watch the video above, via KDKA-TV.

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