Former congressman Adam Kinzinger, one of only a handful of Republicans who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump over the events of January 6, 2021, and one of only two GOP lawmakers to have served on the select committee investigating the same event, denounced Republicans for their hypocrisy in removing disgraced former congressman George Santos (R-New York) from office while still…
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CNN has shattered the speed of light in its haste to recruit former representative Adam Kinzinger to its punditry lineup the millisecond he left congress.
Kinzinger, who prior to being redistricted out of his House seat received handsome campaign contributions from arms manufacturers Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Raytheon, and Northrop Grumman, was arguably the most egregious warmonger on Capitol Hill.
Nobody in congress lobbied as aggressively to start World War Three as Kinzinger did last year; he tried to advance a bill authorizing hot war against Russia if Moscow crossed specified red lines in Ukraine but couldn’t get cosponsors because even his fellow congressional hawks thought it was too insane. He was the loudest voice in the US government publicly advocating a no-fly zone over Ukraine in the early weeks of the war, an idea that was slammed by the mass media as it would necessarily have entailed the US military shooting down Russian war planes and aggressively tempted nuclear war.
class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>All those calls for WWIII must have landed him this gig https://t.co/W5A9zOblNG
— Dave DeCamp (@DecampDave) January 5, 2023
Kinzinger was such a demented omnicidal maniac in 2022 that while still in office he became an official member of the empire-backed online troll farm known as “NAFO”, which was founded by an actual neo-Nazi whom Kinzinger openly supported both before and after revelations emerged of the founder’s expressions of hatred for Jews and fondness for Hitler. While still a sitting congressman he was flagging trolls with hashtags inviting them to swarm the social media comments of critics of US foreign policy who opposed his psychopathic warmongering.
Before the war in Ukraine Kinzinger was calling for the re-invasion of Afghanistan immediately following the US troop withdrawal and raging about public opposition to “endless war.” Before that he was cheerleading Trump’s assassination of Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani, calling for US interventionism in Venezuela, defending the US-backed war on Yemen, calling for the invasion of Syria, and just generally pushing for more war and militarism at every opportunity. Before that, he was helping the empire kill Iraqis as a member of the US Air Force.
Kinzinger is such an obnoxious warmonger online that I myself have called him “the single worst Twitter account that has ever existed,” long before his CNN gig was a twinkle in his eye.
So it’s no wonder a warmongering propaganda network snapped him up the instant he became available, ensuring that his warmongering receives as large a platform as possible. As Antiwar’s Dave DeCamp quipped regarding CNN’s hire, “All those calls for WWIII must have landed him this gig.”
class=”twitter-tweet” data-width=”550″>Shame on my audience for getting such an obvious and easy question wrong (though MSNBC was certainly a reasonable guess): https://t.co/MAQjJraBrd pic.twitter.com/xcETe1fRJg
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 5, 2023
Kinzinger’s assimilation into the war propaganda industry was so predictable that Glenn Greenwald included it in a Twitter poll this past October asking his audience where they expect his career will take him after he leaves congress, with CNN being one of the options. As one Twitter follower put it, the “congressman to media commentator to lobbyist revolving door spins so fast in Washington, it actually affects the earth’s rotation relative to the sun.”
War is the glue that holds the US empire together, and to serve that purpose it requires endless war propaganda. War propagandists are not any more separate from the endless mass military slaughter they facilitate than the people who actually pull the trigger, and we see this illustrated in the way Kinzinger has been able to slide seamlessly from dropping bombs to passing bomb-dropping legislation to manufacturing consent for the dropping of bombs.
We live under an empire that is fueled by lies and human blood, and driven by the ongoing efforts of murderous war sluts like Adam Kinzinger.
CNN will be perfect for him.
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A Republican member of the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election said that he believes former President Donald Trump is “guilty of a crime.” Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Illinois), one of two GOP members on the January 6 committee (and one of 10 Republicans in the House who voted to impeach Trump for…
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Amid global calls for focused diplomacy to end the Russian war on Ukraine, U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger on Sunday introduced a measure that would give congressional authorization for President Joe Biden to intervene militarily if Russia uses biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons.
The outgoing Republican congressman from Illinois announced the Authorization for Use of Military Force to Defend America’s Allies Resolution of 2022 on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” more than two months after Russian President Vladimir Putin launched the long-anticipated invasion.
“I don’t think we need to be using force in Ukraine right now. I just introduced an AUMF, an authorization for the use of military force, giving the president basically congressional leverage or permission to use it if WMDs, nuclear, biological, or chemical are used in Ukraine,” he said on the show, using the abbreviation for weapons of mass destruction.
Kinzinger added in a statement that “Putin must be stopped” and Biden, “the commander in chief to the world’s greatest military, should have the authority and means to take the necessary actions to do so.”
The Biden administration has significantly stepped up security aid to Ukraine since February but stopped short of taking any military action, even denying Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s request for a no-fly zone. While sending arms to Ukraine has been met with mixed responses — some anti-war voices warn it just escalates the conflict — peace advocates and foreign policy experts have praised the U.S. president for not getting involved militarily.
“The Biden administration has wisely ruled out such intervention, whether in the form of a ‘no-fly zone’ or some other military operation, recognizing that it would mean a war with Russia that could quite conceivably escalate into nuclear conflict,” George Beebe and Anatol Lieven recently wrote for Responsible Statecraft.
“Crudely put,” they continued, “mounting an intervention meant to save Ukrainians, only to see them and millions of others incinerated in a nuclear holocaust, would hardly amount to sound moral arithmetic.”
Appearing beside Zelenskyy earlier this week, United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres pledged to boost humanitarian support in Ukraine and “help find the path of peace.”
“This war must end, and peace must be established, in line [with] the charter of the United Nations and international law. Many leaders have made many good efforts to stop the fighting, though these efforts, so far, have not succeeded,” Guterres said. “I am here to say to you, Mr. President, and to the people of Ukraine: We will not give up.”
In Kyiv on Saturday, Zelenskyy met with a congressional delegation led by U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who said in a statement Sunday that the meeting began with the Ukrainian president “thanking the United States for the substantial assistance that we have provided.”
“He conveyed the clear need for continued security, economic, and humanitarian assistance from the United States to address the devastating human toll taken on the Ukrainian people by Putin’s diabolic invasion—and our delegation proudly delivered the message that additional American support is on the way, as we work to transform President Biden’s strong funding request into a legislative package,” she added. “Our delegation conveyed our respect and gratitude to President Zelenskyy for his leadership and our admiration of the Ukrainian people for their courage in the fight against Russia’s oppression.”
Pelosi’s delegation notably includes Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), who was famously the only member of Congress to vote against what she has called “an ill-defined and open-ended” AUMF in response to the September 11, 2001 attacks. That authorization has been used by multiple administrations to justify “counterterrorism” operations all around the world.
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Members of the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol building have said that they expect Rudy Giuliani, who previously served as a personal lawyer to former President Donald Trump, to abide by a subpoena order issued to him last month.
That subpoena order demands that Giuliani hand over documents relating to the attack and to a plan to overturn the outcome of the 2020 presidential race. Giuliani has also been ordered to speak with the committee’s investigators in a closed-door deposition.
Giuliani was scheduled to speak with the January 6 commission last week, but rescheduled, an aide to the select committee said.
In an appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, committee member Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Illinois) said he and other members of the panel expect Giuliani to cooperate in spite of the delay.
“Our expectation is he is going to cooperate because that’s the law, that’s the requirement, same as if somebody subpoenaed to court,” Kinzinger said.
“There may be some changes and dates and moments here as, you know, lawyers do their back and forth,” Kinzinger added. “But we fully expect that, in accordance with the law, we’ll hear from Rudy.”
According to reporting from ABC News, Giuliani has been in active discussions with the January 6 commission, laying out the framework for his testimony. Sources told ABC News that no formal deal has been finalized, and that negotiations could easily fall apart over the next few days.
In a letter that the committee sent to Giuliani outlining their subpoena order last month, the committee explained that they wish to speak with him regarding his “publicly promoted claims that the 2020 election was stolen” and his “attempts to disrupt or delay the certification of the election results.” The committee also cited witness testimony purporting that Giuliani, in December 2020, “urged President Trump to direct the seizure of voting machines around the country after being told that the Department of Homeland Security had no lawful authority to do so.”
Shortly after the subpoena order was issued, it was revealed that Giuliani worked alongside other Trump campaign officials to coordinate a scheme to use fake electors to disrupt the certification of the Electoral College, which was set to take place on January 6, 2021.
Giuliani and other Trump campaign officials devised a plan to use fake electors to submit forged election documents, wrongfully claiming that Trump had won states that were actually won by President Joe Biden. The fake documents were sent to the National Archives and Congress to be counted in the Electoral College; the Trump allies behind the scheme hoped that then-Vice President Mike Pence would either accept the fraudulent votes as real, or say that he couldn’t count any of the votes out of confusion over which were legitimate – allowing them to exploit the mechanisms of the U.S. Constitution to secure Trump’s reelection to the presidency, in spite of him losing the popular vote and the Electoral College to Biden.
Committee members have said they want to investigate the scheme further.
“We want to look at the fraudulent activity that was contained in the preparation of these fake Electoral College certificates,” said January 6 commission member Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland). “And then we want to look to see to what extent this was part of a comprehensive plan to overthrow the 2020 election.”
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Several campaign committees dedicated to electing Democrats have indicated that they will highlight the GOP’s consistent downplaying of the January 6 Capitol attack as part of their midterm election strategy — putting particular emphasis on language that was used by GOP leaders in the censure of Republican Reps. Adam Kinzinger (R-Illinois) and Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming).
In that document, the Republican National Committee (RNC) rebuked Kinzinger and Cheney for working with the House select committee investigating the Capitol attack, describing the events of January 6, 2021, when a mob of Trump loyalists violently interrupted the certification of the 2020 presidential election, as “legitimate political discourse.”
Ever since the censure resolution was voted on and approved by members of the RNC, Republicans have been scrambling to distance themselves from it. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky), for instance, blasted the censure motion’s language, noting that the attack on the Capitol was “a violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent a peaceful transfer of power.”
Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) also spoke out against the document, saying that it would disadvantage Republicans in the upcoming elections this fall. “Every moment that is spent re-litigating a lost election or defending those who have been convicted of criminal behavior moves us further away from the goal of victory this fall,” Collins said.
Several Democratic Party campaign committees and Political Action Committees (PACs) recently told Axios that they won’t let voters forget about the RNC’s characterization of the Capitol breach as “legitimate political discourse.”
“We will ensure that they are held accountable for a position completely at odds with the American people,” House Majority PAC executive director Abby Curran said.
“[We will] continue to remind voters throughout the year that the official position of the Republican Party is that attacking the Capitol … and trying to overturn an election are ‘legitimate political discourse,’” an aide to the Democratic National Committee said.
Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-New York), chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, suggested that the topic will be at the forefront of the midterm races.
“The Republican Party is having a hard time deciding whether a violent attack on the Capitol is good or bad. We think they should have to answer for that,” Maloney said.
Meanwhile, Democratic candidates in swing districts have indicated that they will make the language of the censure resolution a central issue in the upcoming midterms.
“I will challenge an opponent to discuss it. Do they think that was ‘legitimate political discourse’?” Rep. Susan Wild (D-Pennsylvania) said to Axios.
An ABC News/Ipsos poll published in early January found that 72 percent of Americans believe that the attack on the Capitol building last year was a threat to U.S. democracy.
But while some Republicans try to distance themselves from the issue, making statements that reject the language of the RNC censure, this may ultimately be to their detriment: a majority of the poll’s Republican respondents (52 percent) opposed the view of American voters overall, saying that the individuals involved in the attack were “protecting democracy.” This means that in trying to appeal to mainstream voters, GOP candidates may alienate their own base of supporters, lessening their chances of electoral wins.
Typically, the party of the newly elected president fares poorly in the first midterm races after the president assumes office — and with Democrats controlling both houses of Congress by only a slim margin, Republicans are hoping that historical trends from the past half-century will remain true in this year’s midterms.
Highlighting the GOP’s role in the events of January 6 will likely work to Democrats’ advantage — as will emphasizing Republican candidates’ ties to former President Donald Trump, whose favorability ratings in most polls are a net-negative in the double digits.
As of right now, most pundits are saying that Republicans will likely win the midterm races. But polling results are less clear. According to an Economist/YouGov poll published earlier this week, Democrats have a slight upper hand over Republicans, with 43 percent of voters saying they plan to vote for a Democratic candidate and 39 percent saying that they want a Republican to win in their home district.
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A previous draft of the resolution that formally censured Reps. Adam Kinzinger (R-Illinois) and Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming), which was composed by the Republican National Committee (RNC), vastly downplayed the attack on the U.S. Capitol building last year, describing the breach of the Capitol by a mob of Trump loyalists as “non-violent.”
Although the final version of the censure document removed that descriptor, the document’s depiction of the Capitol attack still sparked criticism.
Last week, the RNC voted to adopt a resolution condemning Kinzinger and Cheney for their involvement in the House select committee investigating the attack; the resolution accuses the commission of persecuting Trump loyalists and refers to that day’s violence as “legitimate political discourse.” But an early draft of the censure resolution suggests that the RNC wanted to downplay the events of January 6, 2021, even further.
According to The New York Times, which obtained a copy of the early draft, the RNC was preparing to describe the Capitol attack as “ordinary citizens engaged in nonviolent and legal political discourse.”
Republicans’ positions on the Capitol attack have shifted numerous times over the past year. Initially, most GOP lawmakers and party members condemned the Trump loyalists who breached the Capitol – but gradually, leaders like RNC chair Ronna McDaniel and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California) backtracked their initial disapproval of the day’s events, perhaps influenced by former President Donald Trump’s repeated defense of his loyalists’ actions.
Still, there appears to be a noticeable schism within the Republican Party, as some Republican lawmakers have denounced the censure resolution’s language as inaccurate and flawed. Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) – McDaniel’s uncle – is among those who have voiced their disapproval of the resolution’s wording.
“It could not have been a more inappropriate message,” Romney said, adding that he has “expressed [his] point of view” to McDaniel through text messages.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) has also spoken out against the language used in the censure, breaking away from McCarthy, his counterpart in the House.
“We all were here. We saw what happened,” McConnell said in a recent statement. “It was a violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election, from one administration to the next. That’s what it was.”
Several Democrats condemned the document’s characterization of the Capitol attack.
“There was no ‘legitimate political discourse’ occurring on Jan 6,” said Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Arizona). “What occurred was a mob, incited by the Big Lie, who attacked our democracy.”
The RNC’s censure of Kinzinger and Cheney was also rebuked by members of the January 6 committee.
“Lincoln’s party of ‘liberty and Union’ is now Trump’s party of violence and disunion,” Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Maryland) wrote on Twitter this past weekend.
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On Friday, the Republican National Committee (RNC) voted on a motion to censure two GOP lawmakers in Congress over their anti-Trump stances and their attempts to hold the former president and his allies accountable for the January 6 Capitol attack.
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming) and Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Illinois) will not be removed from the party, but their censure will serve as a stark rebuke from the Republican Party for their views regarding former President Donald Trump.
“We don’t want to disenfranchise those voters. But at the same way [sic], we want to send a message that we are disapproving of their conduct,” California Republican Harmeet Dhillon said.
The censure resolution itself, which was forwarded by the party’s Resolution Committee on Thursday and passed a vote on Friday afternoon, cites the lawmakers’ work with the House select committee investigating the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol building. The resolution also points to the lawmakers’ efforts to “destroy President Trump” as a reason why they are being reprimanded by the party.
The Republican Party claims within the measure that Cheney and Kinzinger, by involving themselves with the January 6 commission, were engaging in the “persecution” of Trump loyalists who attacked the Capitol while the 2020 presidential election was being certified, alarmingly describing the violence seen on that day as “legitimate political discourse.”
The censure measure appears to have the support of RNC chair Ronna McDaniel.
In spite of the resolution’s language, Dhillon insists that Cheney’s and Kinzinger’s views on Trump aren’t the reason why they are being censured.
“There are plenty of other people in the party who are anti-Trump whose names don’t appear in the resolution,” Dhillon said to Politico. “These two took specific action to defy party leadership.”
In anticipation of the vote, Cheney issued a statement noting that the Republican Party has taken an extreme far right turn since Trump became its de facto leader.
“The leaders of the Republican Party have made themselves willing hostages to a man who admits he tried to overturn a presidential election and suggests he would pardon Jan. 6 defendants, some of whom have been charged with seditious conspiracy,” Cheney wrote. “I’m a constitutional conservative and I do not recognize those in my party who have abandoned the Constitution to embrace Donald Trump.”
Some Democratic lawmakers came to Cheney and Kinzinger’s defense, pointing out that the censure resolution was indicative of how extreme the GOP has become.
“In today’s GOP no one is censured for crimes & corruption. Fomenting insurrection, insider trading, fraud, sex trafficking with a minor – all good!” tweeted Rep. Jared Huffman, a Democratic congressman from California. “But dare to OPPOSE crimes/corruption & it’s censure time.”
Although the censure aims to punish Cheney and Kinzinger for their anti-Trump views, it may end up working to their advantage. According to an analysis from NBC News, Republicans who voted to impeach Trump have received more campaign donations than their pro-Trump counterparts — including Cheney, who raised four times more than her primary opponent Harriet Hageman in the last three months of last year.
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On Sunday, a Republican member of the House select committee investigating the January 6 Capital attack said that the commission may seek to subpoena or criminally charge former President Donald Trump.
On the morning of January 6, Trump gave an incendiary speech to his loyalists, claiming that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen and that they must “fight like hell” because they could “never take back our country with weakness.” Directly following that speech, Trump loyalists violently breached the Capitol building, disrupting the congressional certification of the 2020 presidential election. Trump didn’t call off his followers until several hours into the attack.
Because of Trump’s incendiary words and his failure to condemn the actions of his loyalists while the attack was taking place, many lawmakers have suggested that he should be held directly accountable for the attempted usurpation of the 2020 election.
Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Illinois), an outspoken Trump critic and a member of the January 6 commission, said during a Sunday appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union” program that the commission is exploring whether the former president can be held criminally liable for the Capitol attack.
“I don’t want to go there yet to say, ‘Do I believe he has [committed a crime],’ I think that’s obviously a pretty big thing to say,” said Kinzinger, who announced in October that he won’t be running for re-election next fall. “We want to know though, and I think we’ll — by the end of our investigation and by the time our report is out — have a pretty good idea.”
The commission will “be able to have out on the public record anything [the] Justice Department needs, maybe in pursuit [of criminal charges against Trump],” if warranted, Kinzinger went on.
In an appearance on ABC’s “This Week” program, Kinzinger said that Trump isn’t the only Republican official that may bear responsibility for the events of January 6, noting that Republican lawmakers in Congress could also face charges.
Kinzinger said that commission members will “let the facts dictate” their final conclusion — and that it’s possible the commission will subpoena Trump in order to discern what he knew the day of the attack, and how he reacted to the events on the ground.
“Nobody should be above the law, but we also recognize we can get the information without him at this point, and, obviously, when you subpoena the former president, that comes with a whole kind of, you know, circus environment,” Kinzinger said. “But if we need him, we’ll do it.”
Trump has so far sought to block the congressional panel from getting records related to the January 6 attack, citing executive privileges he purportedly has as a former president. Should the commission attempt to subpoena him, it’s likely he’ll use that same argument to resist giving testimony.
But Trump’s executive privilege arguments took a devastating blow earlier this month when a three-judge panel in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit Court ruled that his claims were without merit — and that the commission was entitled to the documents he tried to block.
“The executive privilege for presidential communications is a qualified one that Mr. Trump agrees must give way when necessary to protect overriding interests,” Judge Patricia Millett wrote in the opinion of the court. “The [current] president [Joe Biden] and the legislative branch have shown a national interest in and pressing need for the prompt disclosure of these documents.”
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Congress voted to raise the debt limit on Tuesday after months of brinkmanship and Republican obstruction that threatened economic disaster.
The resolution raises the debt ceiling by $2.5 trillion, staving off the next battle on the fiscal move until 2023. Both chambers of Congress passed the measure largely on party lines, with only one Republican, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Illinois) voting in favor. President Joe Biden is expected to sign it into law as soon as possible.
Over the past months Republicans in the Senate have been threatening to send the U.S. into default for the first time in history over their refusal to raise the debt ceiling. Even as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) was working to cut a deal with Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) this month, Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) insisted that Democrats capitulate to Republican demands on the debt ceiling and tack the issue to their reconciliation bill.
GOP obstruction, which was led by McConnell, pushed the country incredibly close to a default, which Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen predicted would occur on December 15. If the U.S. defaulted, Republicans were likely to blame Democrats for the ensuing economic disaster, obfuscating GOP responsibility.
Even a short default would have caused long-term economic instability, economists warned; a long-term default, meanwhile, would have mechanically triggered a recession, sending the fragile COVID economy spiraling and destroying up to $15 trillion of household wealth. President Joe Biden had slammed Republicans for their political games, calling it “hypocritical, dangerous and disgraceful.”
McConnell and 13 other Republicans in the Senate ended up capitulating on their dangerous game last week, voting with Democrats last week to allow the debt ceiling to be passed with a simple majority in the chamber.
Schumer applauded the resolution’s passage on Tuesday. “As I have said repeatedly, this is about paying debt accumulated by both parties, so I am pleased Republicans and Democrats came together to facilitate a process that has made addressing the debt ceiling possible,” he said.
Indeed, a significant portion of U.S. debt was racked up by Donald Trump. With Republican lawmakers’ help on issues like tax breaks for the wealthy and corporations, the national debt rose by nearly $8 trillion during Trump’s term. This is the third highest increase to the deficit by any presidential administration, only lower than George W. Bush and Abraham Lincoln, both of whom oversaw large wars.
Still, with Republicans refusing to vote to bypass a filibuster on the debt ceiling bill directly, the GOP has set itself up to spew spurious talking points about the debt ceiling in order to attack Democrats. Republicans have been lying about whose debts need to be paid, ignoring their outsized role in the current debt situation. Meanwhile, with only Democrats voting on Tuesday to raise the debt ceiling, Republicans have already begun to attack the party for supposed irresponsibility.
“Later today, every Senate Democrat is going to vote on party lines to raise our nation’s debt limit by trillions of dollars,” McConnell said ahead of the vote. Likely referring to the reconciliation package known as the Build Back Better Act, he continued, “if they jam through another reckless taxing and spending spree, this massive debt increase will just be the beginning.”
However, as the typically conservative Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has found, the Build Back Better Act passed by the House would actually decrease the deficit. Republicans also had very little to say about the debt ceiling when the CBO estimated that the 2017 tax cut would cost the government $2.3 trillion over ten years.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Donald Trump’s Big Lie about the 2020 election was once a fringe idea. It was thought up by Trump and his team to throw the election into chaos and, he hoped, keep Trump in power, no matter the election results.
Republicans in Congress didn’t have to follow suit, but they did and have been repeating the lies about the election for months. Even after their lives were put in danger on January 6 by an angry mob of Trump hooligans, 147 of them voted to overturn the election results. Republicans at the state level, meanwhile, have now passed 30 laws to restrict voting based on the lies about “voter fraud.”
This is all despite the fact that, evidently, Republican lawmakers don’t even believe in the Big Lie. Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Illinois) said on CNN on Wednesday that nearly all of his colleagues in Congress don’t actually believe that there was widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election — but they repeat the lie anyway.
“Save one or two maybe out here, nobody — and I think it’s very important to repeat — nobody actually believes the election was stolen from Donald Trump, but a lot of them are happy to go out and say it was,” Kinzinger told Wolf Blitzer.
Kinzinger, one of the two Republicans on the House committee to investigate January 6, also said that Republican colleagues are quietly supportive of his work on the committee. “There is a lot of people, you know, that come up and say it. And it’s not any of them that go on TV and spout the Big Lie and then say it. It’s the ones that stay more quiet that I think appreciate the stand,” he said. “But it’s a lot.”
Most observers would have a hard time believing that Republicans who don’t stand behind the Big Lie are actually the silent majority in Congress. GOP members have been repeating the lie for months and have even convinced their voter base that the election was stolen, even if they claim in private that they don’t believe it themselves. They had even voted to oust the other Republican on the January 6 committee, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming), from party leadership back in May for not repeating Trump’s lie.
Kinzinger and Cheney aren’t angels. They are, as William Pitt recently wrote for Truthout, “hardcore House Republicans” that count as moderates only because they reject the Big Lie — a very low bar. “At first blush, the inclusion of Cheney and Kinzinger would seem to represent a giant step back” because of their heinous views on LGBTQ rights, health care and the forever wars in the Middle East, Pitt wrote.
But the party as a whole has become so extreme that the two seem like middle-of-the-road legislators. The drama stirred by the party over the January 6 committee did even more to exaggerate that stance.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-California) had raised a stink over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-California) rejection of his picks, Representatives Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and Jim Banks (R-Indiana), from the January 6 committee. He called the process a “sham” and said that the Republican Party would not take part, making it seem as though the entire caucus was opposed to the process.
As Kinzinger has said, however, this is clearly not the case. Though many Trump-allied Republicans downplay the attack today, it would appear that many of them are still alarmed about the severity of the attack, even if they won’t admit it.
Rep. Andrew Clyde (R-Georgia), for instance, has referred to the attack as a “normal tourist visit,” a comparison that he still stands by today. But photos from the day show him and fellow lawmakers barricading the door of the House chamber, suggesting that even he believed it was anything but normal six months ago.
Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Alabama), who had told the Trump mob to “start taking down names and kicking ass” before they attacked the Capitol, recently admitted to Slate that he was warned of the risks of the day and wore body armor to protect himself. Still, he thinks that the January 6 committee isn’t necessary and the conservative attack to reinstate Trump as president despite the will of over 81 million voters would be somehow more politicized than it already has been because of the hearings.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
The House select committee investigating the attack on the Capitol Building, which was undertaken live on television on January 6, 2021 by Donald Trump devotees, opens for business tomorrow. There will be no penalties levied at the end of these hearings, no punishments doled out. The point of the exercise is simplicity itself: This happened, it happened in this way, here is who bore the brunt, there is who bears the stain of final responsibility, and this is what must happen going forward if we wish to cling to the threads of this tattered and tottering democracy.
“[O]n Tuesday, four police officers — two from the Capitol’s protection squad and two from D.C. police — are set to provide the first public testimony before the select committee,” reports The Washington Post. “They are expected to testify about their experiences of both physical and verbal abuse on Jan. 6, as they tried to protect the Capitol from a swelling horde of demonstrators determined to stop Congress’s efforts to certify the 2020 electoral college results and declare Joe Biden the next president.”
While the stark testimony of the various witnesses will surely lie at the heart of this unfolding process, the political logistics behind these hearings are what truly fascinates at this point.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has tapped two hardcore House Republicans — Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois — to join the panel of Democrats who will hear testimony on the Capitol attack. This, after House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy attempted to foist brazen, career liars like Jim Jordan on the committee. Pelosi sent that suggestion packing, and now the venomous relationship between the two is akin to that between owls and crows: two animals, according to Hunter S. Thompson, who will attack each other on sight.
At first blush, the inclusion of Cheney and Kinzinger would seem to represent a giant step back. These are what passes for “moderate,” responsible Republicans today? Adam Kinzinger basically believes just about anyone should be able to carry a concealed pistol just about anywhere, voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act, thinks war with Iran is a bully idea, opposes federal funds for clinics that provide abortions, opposes the Equality Act offering legal protections to the LGBTQ community, and generally represents everything that makes your average progressive want to climb a tree and start speaking squirrel until the bad noise stops.
And as for Liz Cheney? Where to begin. The notorious WMD lies peddled by her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, got millions of people killed, maimed and displaced, and broke the national economy across its knee. Rather than shun these pestiferous familial policies that led the country into our current downward spiral, Liz Cheney embraced them, chairing the Iran Syria Policy and Operations Group with no lesser light than Elliot Abrams, who advocated for war in Iran and further militaristic mayhem in the Middle East.
“[A] few months of courage (if, indeed, that’s what you can call simply accepting the results of a fair and free election) cannot erase a political record that includes support of mass surveillance and the military’s use of torture — even waterboarding! — as well as a hawkishness second only to that of her father (George W. Bush’s war-mongering second in arms),” reports Stuart Emmrich for Vogue. “And let’s not forget the hardline stance she took against gay marriage in 2013, just as she was about to embark on her elected political career (a bid for the U.S. Senate that she ultimately abandoned before deciding instead to run for the House), despite the fact that her own sister Mary, who is a lesbian, married another woman just a year earlier.”
That right there — the very gruesome horror of it — is also the magic of it, maybe the best inside move/rib jab of Speaker Pelosi’s long career. The rank awfulness of Cheney and Kinzinger is what makes their presence on the panel a golden opportunity for those seeking justice and truth about 1/6, and likewise makes their presence a bewildering political conundrum for every Trump defender seeking to discredit the process.
You’re telling me these two aren’t righteous Republicans in the modern vein?
How do you make that argument? How do you say the committee is nothing but a vat of left-wing progressive nonsense seeking to shame a noble man like Trump, if those two are part of the line-up? Before all this happened, Kinzinger’s star was on the rise, and Cheney was the #3 horse in the GOP stable. In a parallel universe where Trump and 1/6 never happened, I’d spit upon hearing their names.
Now? I’ll still spit, but I will also be watching them the way astute baseball fans observe an ace pitcher on the mound in the seventh game of the World Series, how they work the dirt, how they paint the corners of the strike zone, and most important of all, how well their fastball eats up the batter. McGhan, McCarthy, Wray, Milley, Meadows, Ivanka, Stone, Giuliani, Tuberville, Brooks… oh, man.
Cheney and Kinzinger are at the mercy of their voters next year, having burned their bridges to Trump’s GOP. The best they can do for themselves is bring all the fire they can to this hearing, to prove they were right to take the stand they did. It is in their most profound self-interest to focus on getting to the truth of all this. It is, in fact, their best re-election campaign strategy. Set ‘em up and knock ‘em down, and let the million flowers bloom.
If Pelosi and her colleagues are as wise as they seem with these choices, they will have Cheney and Kinzinger ask all the dagger questions during these hearings. The pair’s only Republican sin is their disdain for Donald Trump. In the larger majority world beyond the GOP, that’s no sin at all.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Rep. Adam Kinzinger, a Republican congressman from Illinois and an anomaly within his party for his frequent criticisms of former President Donald Trump, said this week that most GOP members within the House of Representatives don’t actually believe the election fraud lies that Trump has pushed since losing the presidential race last fall.
Speaking to CNN’s Jake Tapper about the issue, Kinzinger explained that most Republicans in Congress who peddle Trump’s falsehoods (in which the former president claims election fraud cost him the election to President Joe Biden) only do so out of a desire for self-preservation.
The number of true believers in the party, Kinzinger added, is actually quite small.
“How many actually believe it? Five, probably, if that, maybe?” Kinzinger said on the program. “I don’t know, but it’s in the single, it’s low.”
But because Trump’s base of supporters so ardently believe the former president’s lies about the election, it behooves lawmakers in Washington, whether they themselves believe it or not, to act like they do.
“People don’t believe it,” Kinzinger maintained. “But what they are doing is they’re sitting around saying, ‘I need to continue to exist in this job so that I can make an impact. I don’t have the courage or the strength or the ability to swing this party, so I’m going to just kinda put my head down and go along.’”
Kinzinger’s comments come as members of the GOP in the House are caught up in a battle among themselves over whether they should remove Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming), who has also publicly stated that she doesn’t believe Trump’s election fraud lies, from her leadership position in the House GOP caucus. Cheney, who herself has put forward alarming and questionable claims criticizing the Obama administration, also voted to impeach Trump for his role in inciting a mob of his loyalists to attack the Capitol on January 6.
Kinzinger said he wasn’t sure if backing Trump’s lies now would help Republicans in the 2022 midterms, but he was certain it wouldn’t help his party in the long term.
“I guarantee you in the long arc of history, this is not going to bode well for Republicans,” he said.
Kinzinger’s rhetoric matches similar comments recently made by veteran Republican pollster Frank Luntz, who also believes that pushing Trump’s lies is detrimental to the party. But while Kinzinger sees it as damaging to the image of the GOP, Luntz believes pushing false claims of election fraud will foment distrust among the party’s base of voters.
“This could cost the Republicans the majority in the House in 2022. What Donald Trump is saying is actually telling people it’s not worth it to vote,” Luntz said during a New York Times podcast. “Donald Trump single-handedly may cause people not to vote. And he may be the greatest tool in the Democrats’ arsenal to keep control of the House and Senate in 2022.”
Although alarm bells like these are being rung by some in the party, others, including Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina), have noted that Trump’s popularity among Republican voters makes it difficult to stand up to him and his lies.
“The most popular Republican in America — it’s not Lindsey Graham, is not Liz Cheney; it’s Donald Trump,” Graham said during an appearance on Fox News Monday night.
“To try to erase Donald Trump from the Republican Party is insane. And the people who try to erase him are going to wind up getting erased,” Graham added.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Florida), currently embroiled in a scandal tying him to an indicted former official in Florida who has been charged with sex-trafficking crimes, reportedly paid that person in two transactions containing the same amount of money later sent to three women.
The Daily Beast reports that Gaetz sent $900 to Joel Greenberg, a former tax collector for Seminole County, Florida, through the cash-sharing app Venmo. The morning after Gaetz had sent the money, Greenberg sent the exact same amount to three women.
Gaetz has denied involvement with Greenberg’s activities, but in one of the memo fields of the transactions, the congressman wrote “hit up ___,” with the blank space being the name of one of the women Greenberg would eventually forward the money to. (The woman is now part of the adult film industry, The Daily Beast reported.) Greenberg himself described the payments as being for “Tuition” or “School” in his memo fields to the women.
The revelation of these payments, in conjunction with related investigations into Gaetz’s actions, prompted Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Illinois) to call for Gaetz to resign, becoming the first Republican official in Congress to do so.
“Matt Gaetz needs to resign,” Kinzinger wrote in a Twitter post, citing the reporting by The Daily Beast.
Matt Gaetz needs to resign. https://t.co/AygfqAxQJX via @thedailybeast
— Adam Kinzinger (@AdamKinzinger) April 9, 2021
Greenberg has been indicted on 33 federal criminal charges, including sex-trafficking crimes involving a 17-year-old. The Justice Department is examining Gaetz’s payment history, The New York Times reported earlier this month, investigating his and Greenberg’s involvement with women who were recruited online to engage in sex in exchange for gifts or payments.
The Justice Department is also examining whether Gaetz violated federal sex-trafficking laws based on sexual relations he allegedly had with a 17-year-old.
Several federal statutes make it illegal to induce the travel of a person under age 18 over state lines to have sexual relations in exchange for money or gifts. The investigation of Gaetz and whether he violated those laws was opened in the final months of the Trump administration. Gaetz, a strong ally of the former president, also sought a blanket pardon from Trump in the final weeks of his tenure, which would have essentially removed the possibility of Gaetz being prosecuted for any crime he may have committed over a certain period of time. The request was denied by the White House.
Gaetz denied any wrongdoing in an op-ed he wrote for The Washington Times published on Monday. He said he has “never, ever paid for sex,” and indicated he did not have a sexual relationship with a minor.
In the same op-ed, Gaetz indicated he is “absolutely not resigning” from office.
In spite of those assertions, many recent developments have suggested that Gaetz is in hot water. At a court hearing on Thursday involving Greenberg, for example, federal prosecutors indicated that they expected the indicted former tax collector to work out a plea deal with them.
“We believe this case will be a plea,” U.S. Attorney Roger Handberg said.
Although a plea arrangement hasn’t been formalized yet, Greenberg’s own attorney, Fritz Scheller, suggested his client was in a good position to create a plea deal, implying that his closeness to Gaetz should give the congressman reason to worry.
“I’m sure Matt Gaetz is not feeling very comfortable today,” Scheller said to reporters earlier this week.
This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.