WASHINGTON — Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell on Tuesday said it was “not the job” of the Republican National Committee to censure Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for participating in the House investigation into the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, which he described as a “violent insurrection” in contrast to the party’s resolution characterizing it as “legitimate political discourse.”
His blunt rebuke of the RNC’s actions on Friday contrasted sharply with House GOP leader Kevin McCarthy, who declined to say whether he supported the move, and a fellow member of House Republican leadership who said the party acted within its rights.
The resolution’s continuing reverberations laid bare the unresolved tensions within the Republican Party, between those who want to keep the focus solely on Democrats in the run-up to this year’s midterm elections, and former President Donald Trump and his loyalists who are fixated on punishing his political opponents and relitigating the 2020 presidential race.
Cheney, of Wyoming, and Kinzinger, of Illinois, especially have been targets of the former president’s ire for being the only two Republicans to serve on the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack, in which a mob of Trump supporters overran the U.S. Capitol in hopes of preventing the certification of Joe Biden’s victory.
The RNC censure slammed the panel as a “Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse.”
Trump cheered the resolution on Friday, disparaging Cheney and Kinzinger as “RINOs,” for Republicans in Name Only, and stating that “the Republican Party would be far better off without them!”
But the censure was almost immediately denounced by some Republicans as whitewashing the horrors of that day, stoking divisions within the party and distracting from the GOP’s mission to make 2022 a referendum on Democratic governance.
McConnell, who gave his first remarks about the resolution on Tuesday, was pointed in describing what happened on Jan. 6.
“It was a violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent a peaceful transfer of power after a legitimately certified election from one administration to the next,” he said at his weekly Capitol Hill news conference.
He said the RNC’s move to single out Cheney and Kinzinger was a break from the norm of the party not involving itself in primary fights.
“Traditionally, the view of the national party committee is that we support all members of our party, regardless of their positions on some issues,” he added.
McCarthy, stopped in the Capitol hallways by a CNN reporter Tuesday, said the party resolution was not referring to those who committed violent acts. (The text of the censure has no specific denunciation of the day’s violence.)
“Everybody knows anybody who broke in and caused damage that was not called for — those people, we said from the very beginning, should be in jail,” McCarthy said. “What they were talking about is the six RNC members who (the Jan. 6 committee) subpoenaed who weren’t even here, who were in Florida that day.”
He later speed-walked away from an ABC News reporter asking about the resolution, saying she should make an appointment with his office.
McCarthy was not present at Tuesday’s news conference for House Republican leadership. Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, the No. 3-ranked House Republican who ascended to the position after the GOP booted Cheney from leadership, said “the RNC has every right to take any action.”
“The position I have is you’re ultimately held accountable to voters in your district, voters who you represent,” she added, “and we’re going to hear the feedback and the views of voters pretty quickly here this year."
Stefanik said Republicans have been “very clear” in condemning the violence of Jan. 6, and swiped at Democrats for not making similar statements during violence that erupted in some protests after George Floyd’s killing by a Minneapolis police officer in 2020.
She added that Republicans “believe the Jan. 6 commission is political theater. It’s about punishing partisan opponents.”
But others in the Republican Party denounced the censure’s wording, which seemingly endorsed the Jan. 6 actions as “legitimate.”
“It could not have been a more inappropriate message,” said Sen. Mitt Romney of Utah to reporters on Monday. “One, to sanction two people of character as they did. But No. 2, to suggest that a violent attack on the seat of democracy is legitimate political discourse is so far from accurate as to shock and make people wonder what we’re thinking.”
RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, who is Romney’s niece, has said the resolution was not intended as an endorsement of the Capitol rioters.
“The RNC has repeatedly condemned all acts of political violence and lawlessness, including what occurred on Jan. 6. Unfortunately, this committee has gone well beyond the scope of the events of that day, and (that) is why the RNC overwhelmingly passed a resolution censuring Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger,” an RNC spokeswoman said Tuesday.
———
(Times staff writer Jennifer Haberkorn in Washington contributed to this report.)
