A member of the House Republican caucus is speaking out and letting it be known that the GOP in its current form has utterly capitulated to the lies and lunacy of former President Donald Trump, and that he cannot sit still and watch as his party is destroyed without sounding an alarm.
Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-IL) has long been a critic of Trump, but remarks he made to The New York Times Magazine are some of the harshest yet, with the Illinois congressman noting:
“I made the decision early in my career that I would be willing to take a potentially career-ending vote. But I thought that vote would be for something like a Social Security reform bill. I never thought it would be for defending democracy.”
The vote Kinzinger took to defend democracy was when he voted to authorize the creation of a bipartisan commission to examine what happened on January 6 and who is responsible for the Capitol insurrection which left five people dead.
Kinzinger was especially critical of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA):
“Kevin gave a great speech the week after that, and then he went to Mar-a-Lago and charged the paddles and brought Trump back to life. That’s the moment when I realized, Oh, man, this is a problem. You come to understand that when the party and party leaders talk about unity, and in the same breath, say that Donald Trump is the leader of the Republican Party, what they’re talking about isn’t unity. They’re talking about capitulation. When under the guise of unity, you act like Jan. 6 was just whatever you want to make of it, that is capitulating to a false narrative and to a dangerous attack on democracy. I will certainly talk to Kevin if he wants to. But I don’t see how we’re ever going to come eye-to-eye on this until there is a recognition that we can’t be the party of insurrection.”
And yet the GOP has indeed become the party of insurrection, with almost no Republicans being willing to say what needs to be said: That what transpired on Jan. 6 was a direct attack on the United States and an abomination that must be condemned in the strongest possible terms.
Of special concern to Kinzinger is the fact that he suspects there are current Republicans in Congress who knew what was going to take place on the fateful January day, yet didn’t say a word or warn their colleagues or the authorities:
“I will say, if you just looked at Twitter — the whole reason I brought my gun and kept my staff home and told my wife to stay in the apartment was looking at Twitter. I saw the threats. When Lauren Boebert — I will call her out by name — tweeted ‘Today is 1776,’ I don’t know what that meant other than this is the time for revolution. Maybe it was a dumb tweet that she didn’t mean. Fine. I’ll give her that credit for now. But if you have members of Congress who were involved in nurturing an insurrection, heck yeah, we need to know.”
Fortunately, a select committee is now investigating what happened on Jan. 6. And if it finds that some members of Congress did indeed have advance knowledge of the attack, they need to be booted from their seats and handed over to the Justice Department for prosecution.