More Than 50 GOP Officials Support Removing Cheney, Kinzinger From House GOP

More than 50 Republican National Committee members are supporting a proposal to endorse removing U.S. Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger from the House Republican Conference.

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Ellen Fike

February 02, 20223 min read

Cheney on 60 Minutes

More than 50 members of the Republican Party’s National Committee are supporting a proposal to remove U.S. Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger from the House Republican Conference.

The proposal will be introduced this week during the RNC’s winter conference in Salt Lake City.

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

The resolution is intended as a punishment for Cheney and Kinzinger for their positions on the committee investigating the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. If approved by a resolutions committee meeting on Thursday, all 168 RNC members would vote on it Friday, according to CNN.

“We want to make a statement. This is an inquisition, and we just feel like they are trying to dig up anything they can but that it’s one-sided,” Jonathan Barnett, a national committeeman from Arkansas who is among the resolution’s co-sponsors, told CNN Tuesday. “We don’t understand Liz and Adam. There’s just a lot of frustration with the Jan. 6 committee and we don’t think there’s any representation on the Republican side.”

Cheney was ousted from her post as House Republican Conference chair last May following her vote to impeach former President Donald Trump for the role he allegedly played in inciting the riot. She has also faced much criticism from Republicans due to her refusal to fall in line with the rest of her party.

Cheney voted with Trump more than 90% of the time before her impeachment vote.

A number of conservative officials sent a letter to House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-California, last month, asking him to remove Cheney and Kinzinger from the House Republican Conference.

“As part of Pelosi’s team, Reps. Cheney and Kinzinger have deliberately sought to undermine the privacy and due process of their fellow Republicans, and those of private citizens, with improperly issued subpoenas and other investigatory tactics designed not to pursue any valid legislative end, but merely to exploit for the sake of political harassment and demagoguery,” the letter said.

The letter said that as elected representatives, the two should be free to serve in the House, but no longer with the privileges granted to members of the conference.

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Ellen Fike

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