RNC advances censure of Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger over Jan.6 committee roles [Video]

WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW:

• Members of the Republican National Committee passed a resolution to censure Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for serving on the January 6 Committee.
• The RNC resolution committee declined to call for Cheney and Kinzinger to be expelled from the House Republican Conference.
• The RNC’s full body will likely vote to approve the censure at its winter meeting on Friday.

Members of the Republican National Committee’s (RNC) resolutions committee on Thursday unanimously passed a resolution to censure Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.). The committee declined to call for Cheney and Kinzinger to be expelled from the House Republican Conference.

The RNC’s full body will likely vote to approve the censure on Friday at its winter meeting.

The resolution committee criticizes Cheney’s and Kinzinger’s involvement in the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. The two are the only two Republican members of the panel.

“This is not about them being anti-Trump,” Harmeet Dhillon, a national committee member from California and one of the sponsors of the resolution, told Politico. “There are plenty of other people in the party who are anti-Trump whose names don’t appear in the resolution. These two took specific action to defy party leadership.”

Dhillon also said that RNC chairwoman Ronna McDaniel spoke in favor of the resolution as passed by the resolutions committee, Politico reported. 

Initially, Trump campaign adviser David Bossie called for Cheney’s and Kinzinger’s ouster from the House conference.

This comes nearly a year after Cheney was removed from the House GOP leadership last year after she voted to impeach Trump for inciting the deadly Jan. 6 attack.

In a statement on the RNC resolution, Kinzinger said he is now “even more committed to fighting conspiracies and lies.”

He slammed the committee for choosing to censure “two lifelong Members of their party for simply upholding their oaths of office” rather than focusing “on how to help the American people.”

Cheney criticized Republican party leadership in a statement, saying they had “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.”

“I’m a constitutional conservative and I do not recognize those in my party who have abandoned the Constitution to embrace Donald Trump,” she said. “History will be their judge. I will never stop fighting for our constitutional republic. No matter what.”

Source: The Hill