Utah Republicans seem likely to reward Mitt Romney for his disastrous loss to Barack Obama in 2012 by nominating him this week as their candidate for the U.S. Senate to replace retiring Sen. Orrin Hatch. And because Utah is a solidly Republican state, that means he would probably be elected Senator in November.

I will not beat around the bush: This is bad news for conservatives.

Romney is expected to be just what the Washington establishment is looking for - a high-profile Republican senator who will lead bipartisan opposition to President Trump and the populist-conservative agenda that swept the elections of 2016.

With the coming retirements of Jeff Flake of Arizona and Bob Corker of Tennessee, the two senators most openly critical of Trump, and with Senator John McCain's increasingly bad health, the establishment desperately needs a new voice in the Senate.  Romney, the 2012 Republican nominee for president, fits the bill perfectly.  He is well-known, has a long record of opposing Trump, and has made clear his hostility to Trump's conservative agenda.  No wonder House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi recently commented about Romney, "Wouldn't it be nice if he were president of the United States?"

Nancy Pelosi's dream for Romney is no doubt a result of the nightmares President Trump is giving her. But Business Insider reports less ambitious speculation that a Senator Romney would succeed Mitch McConnell as Senate GOP leader and then run Congress with his 2012 running mate, House Speaker Paul Ryan, thus keeping the establishment Republicans firmly in control.  

A Senator Romney means we conservatives will have to work even harder to take over the Republican Party from these liberal elitists. FedUp PAC is up to the job-with your support.

Why Romney Lost in 2012

Governor Romney won the 2012 Republican nomination by spending tens of millions of dollars knee-capping his conservative opponents in the primaries, and then handed the election to Obama because he and his campaign team spent most of the campaign mired in the establishment Republican folly of trying to win by standing for nothing.

The "stand for nothing" strategy didn't work for President Ford's 1976 campaign, it didn't work for President George H.W. Bush's re-election, and it certainly didn't work for Bob Dole and John McCain.

Republicans never, ever, win the presidency unless they nationalize the election by campaigning on a conservative agenda.

While Obama and the Democrats threw down the gauntlet on the social issues-such as same-sex marriage and abortion-Romney and the Republicans ran away from such issues as same-sex marriage, religious freedom, and Obama's war on the Catholic Church. You couldn't find any mention of the Constitution or the conservative social agenda in a Romney ad or in a Karl Rove-run Super PAC ad or an ad run by the national GOP.

The establishment Republicans who held the reins and the checkbooks chose to run negative ads against Obama and campaign almost solely on Romney's biography and economic policies, while skipping the social issues and the concerns of Tea Partiers and small government constitutional conservatives.

In choosing to ignore the larger conservative agenda, Romney chose not to follow the path that led Republicans to win seven of the previous eleven presidential elections.

Despite the efforts of millions of conservatives, who went all-in for the Romney candidacy in an effort to deny reelection to President Obama, Election Day 2012 was a disaster-Barack Obama was re-elected President, Republicans lost seats in the House, and failed to gain a majority in the Senate.

However, out of that disaster came some good news: Conservatives said "Never again" would we nominate a big government establishment Republican for President. The result was a tide of conservative populism and nationalism that resulted in the candidacy and election of Donald Trump in 2016.

That election of President Trump was a repudiation of the type of failed candidacy and thought patterns that Mitt Romney displayed four years earlier. As I said right after the 2012 election, and has been demonstrated since then, Mitt Romney's loss was the death rattle of establishment GOP presidential candidacies. But that doesn't mean the establishment Republicans will give up. They will join the Democrats in trying to subvert conservative policies in any way possible.

Mr. Crony Capitalist

As Senator, Mitt Romney will be in opposition to President Trump's economic nationalism to make America great again. An example is Obama's job-killing Trans Pacific Partnership, which Trump saved us from but Romney considered "good for America."

What kind of capitalism does Romney support? Is it the free-market capitalism that created America's middle class, or the crony capitalism that has decimated that middle class during all of this century?

We know from his record as a co-founder and president of the vulture-venture capital firm, Bain Capital, that he specialized in firing workers and stripping companies.

And when the financial system devised by he and his Wall Street friends failed, his response was to support the $700 billion TARP Wall Street bailout, making hard-working taxpayers bail out the culprits responsible for the Frankenstein's monster their greed created. Millions of workers found themselves unemployed or underemployed in the years after the bailout, but the insiders who received TARP's no-strings- attached cash-the bailout supported by Romney-included Goldman Sachs Group Inc, Deutsche Bank AG, Merrill Lynch, Societe Generale, Calyon, Barclays Plc, Rabobank, Danske, HSBC, Royal Bank of Scotland, Banco Santander, Morgan Stanley, Wachovia, Bank of America, and Lloyds Banking Group. The high-up American employees of those bailed out firms supported Romney handsomely in his presidential campaign. No surprise there. You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours.

Another area where Romney can be expected to be a disaster is in getting Republicans lined up to save ObamaCare.  That makes sense, considering that as Governor of Massachusetts he was responsible for joining with Democrats to enact RomneyCare, which had many similarities to ObamaCare.  Governor Romney also supports gun control, abortion, and amnesty for illegal aliens. 

What Can Be Done?

If Romney is elected, the damage can be minimized if Republicans increase their Senate majority this year.  There are ten Democrats running in states that voted for Trump in 2016, and many of them are considered vulnerable.  In fact, the political writers at The Washington Post say that eight of the nine most vulnerable Senate incumbents are Democrats.

If the current 51-49 Republican majority were increased to something like 55-45, Romney and the Democrats would have to peel off six Republican senators in order to overcome the majority (and that's without taking into account how Republican gains would affect the voting records of Democrats facing reelection in 2020).  ObamaCare would probably have been repealed last year if the GOP had only had that large a majority.

Without a larger majority in 2019, Romney will be in a position to join with Susan Collins (R-ME), John McCain (R-AZ), and perhaps a few other Republicans to block anything proposed by President Trump.

That is just not acceptable!  It's not why we elected President Trump and a Republican Congress.

FedUp PAC is ready to lead the fight to nominate and elect constitutional conservatives in November.  We demonstrated in 2016 the effectiveness of our carefully targeted voter contact programs, and we will work even harder to mobilize the grass roots this year.