Where are today’s Republicans of conscience, principle and courage?

If there are any leading Republicans with a semblance of spine and any inkling for putting the national interest above the parochial and partisan, history is begging you to come forward.

It was not always so. Picture a scene so at odds with the sad, current climate of uber-partisanship and Republican capitulation. On a steamy August day in 1974, Sen. Hugh Scott, Rep. John Rhodes and Sen. Barry Goldwater — respectively, the GOP leader of the Senate, his House counterpart, and a prior presidential nominee regarded as the father of modern conservatism — descended on the White House to inform President Richard Nixon that the jig was up and that the party caucus in both houses was no longer willing to stand by or defend him.

Nixon announced his resignation the next day and boarded his helicopter with a final salute a day after that. Upon taking the oath of office, newly installed President Gerald Ford declared, “Our long national nightmare is over.”

Now try to imagine such a delegation making its way down Pennsylvania Avenue to deliver such a reprimand to Donald Trump. Not to show him the door, impeachment being over and done, but simply with a critical word or firmly-stated corrective.

Pure fantasy.

Of all the presidents to command his party’s utter submission, why this one? A president for whom loyalty is ever a one-way street. Whose north star is his all-consuming narcissism. Whose sole mathematical skill is division.

Even Trump’s Republican credentials were born far more out of convenience than conviction. His 2016 nomination was tantamount to a hostile takeover. Yet those he vanquished now exhibit a pronounced case of Stockholm syndrome.

It is all really quite amazing. Republicans of brains and talent, often espousing rather strict moral codes, stand mute.

Senior figures like Chuck Grassley, Lamar Alexander, John Cornyn and Rob Portman — silent as mice.

Young guns such as Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton, Josh Hawley and Mike Lee — the cat not only got their tongues but brutally ripped them out.

And Cory Gardner — ah, never mind.

Yes, there is the lonely, solitary voice of Mitt Romney. And echoes from John McCain’s grave after Trump, a man without honor, repaid his lifetime of service with raw contempt.

Put aside the litany of past-tense outrages from the attack on the ethnicity of a federal judge to the shout-out to the “very fine people” at Charlottesville to the juvenile mocking of a disabled reporter to the slur against a Gold Star family.

Relegate all that to the past and what do you have here and now? A president who’s grown? Who’s shown remorse and learned from his errors? Who’s upped his game?

No, it’s the same Donald Trump because what you see is what you get. Give him this — unlike most politicians, there is little veneer.

But as the country descends into crisis layered upon crisis, Trump’s manifest unfitness becomes ever more evident and toxic. He flirts ever closer with taking this country on a despotic path from which there might not be a route of return.

As this is written early in the week, Trump has praised the idea of an “occupying force” in American cities; threatened to deploy the U.S. military on a domestic operation; and referenced the Second Amendment while neglecting the First Amendment in discussing the growing protests.

To top off the day, at his behest, a park across from the White House was violently cleared of peaceful protestors so that he could stroll to the entrance of a torched church for a photo-op of him wielding the Bible as a foreign object.

He’s almost a menacingly comic figure, playing the tough guy. In a country desperate for healing, he knows only escalation.

A local Republican of prominence once explained his acceptance of Trump by considering him an all-inclusive, fixed-price meal as opposed to an a la carte menu. The point being that Trump is an all-or-nothing proposition — that you must put up with the insults and low character in return for some conservative governance and policy disruption.

My friend’s analysis is correct, but his bargain is a bad one. The Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, foretold this story a full two and a half millennia ago in noting, “Character is destiny.”

Too many Republicans of intellect who should know better, and privately do, have made a pact that defies this age-old warning. They’ve accepted the unacceptable in return for some conservative judges, a deregulatory step here and there, a tax break or two, and a finger in the eye of political foes.

Biblical scholarship is not my usual turf. But in this instance, the Gospel of Mark comes to mind. “What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, but lose his soul?’

Trump’s inaugural address, his first presidential act, talked of “American carnage.” Little did all of us know. Look around at the carnage of recent months — viral and economic carnage made much worse by a tardy, halting, inept response; the carnage of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and far too many others; and now the physical carnage in streets across America.

All underpinned by the moral rot starting at the top.

For this, Republicans face the prospect, increasing by the day, of electoral carnage come November. Even with looming rejection to concentrate the mind, instead of an intervention as any functioning family would have long ago initiated, the muzzles remain in place.

In 1954, attorney Joseph Welch, representing the U.S. Army, delivered the definitive rebuke to Sen. Joseph McCarthy. “Have you no sense of decency?”

Fast forward 66 years. As a nation screams, all that is heard from one top Republican after another is crickets.

Eric Sondermann is a Colorado-based independent political commentator. His column appears regularly on Sundays in ColoradoPolitics. Reach him at EWS@EricSondermann.com; follow him at @EricSondermann