The Republican Party on Friday officially declared the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol and events that led to it “legitimate political discourse,” and rebuked two lawmakers in the party who have been most outspoken in condemning the deadly riot and the role of Donald J. Trump in spreading the election lies that fueled it.
The Republican National Committee’s voice vote to censure Representatives Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois at its winter meeting in Salt Lake City culminated more than a year of vacillation, which started with party leaders condemning the Capitol attack and Mr. Trump’s conduct, then shifted to downplaying and denying it.
On Friday, the party went further in a resolution slamming Ms. Cheney and Mr. Kinzinger for taking part in the House investigation of the assault, saying they were participating in “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”
They wrote it and they signed it. Afterwards they said they didn’t mean to excuse the violent insurrectionists when they said Cheney and Kinzinger’s participation in the January 6th Committee was “persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”
“Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger crossed a line,” Ronna McDaniel, the Republican National Committee chairwoman, said in a statement. “They chose to join Nancy Pelosi in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens who engaged in legitimate political discourse that had nothing to do with violence at the Capitol.”
But the censure, which was carefully negotiated in private among party members, made no such distinction. It was the latest and most forceful effort by the Republican Party to minimize what happened and the broader attempt by Mr. Trump and his allies to invalidate the results of the 2020 election. In approving it and opting to punish two of its own, Republicans seemed to embrace a position that many of them have only hinted at: that the assault and the actions that preceded it were acceptable.
I think trying to appease the Orange Julius Caesar has finally fried their brains.
Meanwhile, down in Florida, we have Mike Pence trying mightily to walk the GOP tightrope without falling to his political death:
Good luck to him. The Federalist Society members didn’t exactly launch into ecstatic applause although they did stand at the end of his speech. But he said it and it’s out there.
So let the games begin. So far Dear Leader must be in his bed eating his feelings because we haven’t seen a response just yet.