We’d meet for breakfast or lunch when he was in town. We’d talk Missouri politics. We’d talk about our sons, and our families. He’d call from an elevator or in an SUV on the way to a fundraiser. I was hardly alone. If you spend much time in and around politics, Blunt has your number and will use it. He collects relationships like some people collect stamps or baseball cards.
We haven’t talked much lately. The reason?
Donald J. Trump, or, as the former president likes to be called these days, The 45th President.
About five years ago, after Trump had secured enough delegates to win the GOP nomination for president, Blunt embraced Trump as his choice in the presidential race. It wasn’t exactly a fervent embrace. I wrote, at the time, that I thought it put Blunt in an uncomfortable place.
I also wrote that I believed he was choosing party over country. Blunt didn’t like that. He told me so in an uncomfortable phone call on a Saturday. We haven’t spoken much since.
So I was as surprised as the rest of the political world Monday morning when I scrolled through Twitter and saw a video from Blunt announcing that he wasn’t running for reelection. The decision was reminiscent of the one that led to Blunt’s first election as a senator in 2010. In January 2009, longtime U.S. Senator from Missouri, and former governor, Christopher “Kit†Bond, stunned the Missouri political world with the announcement that he would not run for reelection. A scramble ensued, Blunt came out on top, and in 2010 he defeated Democrat Robin Carnahan for the seat.
Thank you, Missourians, for the opportunity to work for you and a better future for our state and our country.
— Senator Roy Blunt (@RoyBlunt)
If not for Trump, who changed the electoral math in 2016, Blunt might have lost that year to Democrat Jason Kander. But he snuck by, and over the past four years, he’s been a consistent enabler of Trump. Every once in awhile, that “uncomfortable place†I predicted would show up, with Blunt inching toward public criticism of the president, but never quite following it up with a vote, such as to convict in the two impeachment trials, or the sort of strong moral statements against the president’s failures like those made by former U.S. Sen. John C. Danforth, or, most recently in the House, by Republicans Liz Cheney of Wyoming or Adam Kinzinger of Illinois.
As a politician, Blunt tried to live in both worlds, and that left him, going into 2022, perhaps, a man without a party. His enabling aside, Blunt was never really a Trump Republican, and that’s what it was likely going to take to win the GOP nomination in Missouri next year.
The thing about Blunt is, people like him, which is to say, he’s no Josh Hawley or Ted Cruz.
When she was in the Senate, Blunt was friends with Sen. Claire McCaskill, a Missouri Democrat who is now an MSNBC political analyst. Both senators would notoriously whisper about their friendship, lest they lose face in the ultra-partisan new politics that has embraced the nation.
Outside of his partisan votes in which he was consistently a Trumper, Blunt liked to wield what power he had in the Senate to do some important, bipartisan things. He increased National Institutes of Health funding, a major boon to Washington University and other research universities in the country. He played a major role in making sure the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency stayed in ºüÀêÊÓƵ.
He would have liked, I think, the idea being floated by Congressional Democrats to bring back earmarks. As a representative and a senator, Blunt was the ultimate horse-trader, the sort of negotiator that had the relationships to work behind the scenes in both parties to help pass the second leg of the Troubled Asset Relief Program in 2008, even while voting against it.
Blunt liked to consider himself an old-school institutionalist in the Senate, though, again, that perspective was damaged by the Trump years, where Republicans eschewed the concept of “regular order†whenever it benefited the president.
Now, by stepping down, he’s messing with the regular order in Missouri, and, for awhile, at least, creating political chaos as members of his party begin the rush to jockey for the prized Senate seat. I suspect Blunt is at peace with his decision.
John Wood is a former U.S. Attorney and ºüÀêÊÓƵ native who got his start in politics interning for Sen. John C. Danforth.
Sen. Roy Blunt mingles after a press conference held at the Wentzville Assembly and Stamping plant on Friday, Dec. 13, 2019 to announce GM's plan to invest $1.5 billion to bring its next generation of midsize pick up trucks to market. Photo by Troy Stolt, tstolt@post-dispatch.com