RNC Purity Test To Purge Republicans Who Do Not Bend The Knee To ‘Dear Leader’ Donald Trump (Updated)

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Hey you guys at the Arizona Republic editorial page, clutching your pearls over the Arizona Democratic Party censuring Sen. Kyrsten Sinema for being a Vichy Democrat collaborator with the enemies of democracy in the Sedition Party to filibuster voting rights. Here’s something you really should be having a conniption fit over (unless you are all now members of the personality cult of Donald Trump).

The Washington Post reports, Trump ally pushes Republican Party to expel Cheney, Kinzinger:

David Bossie, a prominent Trump ally is pushing the Republican Party to formally expel Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger at the party’s annual meeting this week in Salt Lake City, setting up a public showdown over the party’s direction.

Bossie, a two-time Trump campaign adviser who serves as a national committeeman from Maryland, submitted a resolution to party leadership that attacks Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Kinzinger (R-Ill.) and calls for the Republican National Committee to formally endorse their ouster from the House Republican conference, according to people with knowledge of the document.

The resolution has circulated among party officials and members in recent days. It is co-sponsored by Frank Eathorne, the state chairman of the Wyoming Republican Party and a Trump ally. RNC Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel has not taken a position on the resolution.

The resolution is expected to be debated by RNC members in Salt Lake City this week, where the party gathers for its annual meeting, according to Republican Party officials and RNC members. Should the resolution pass, it would be an unusual and public rebuke from a political party against two of its incumbent members of Congress.

In the resolution, Bossie cites the pair’s work for the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol as a reason they should be expelled from being Republicans, along with their efforts to “destroy President Trump,” according to people with knowledge of the document. In the document, he says the two should focus on helping Republicans win back the House of Representatives instead of helping Democrats through their work on the committee, people familiar with the document say.

“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. “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.”

Kinzinger could not be immediately reached for comment. Kinzinger has said he is not running for reelection, and Cheney faces a tough race in Wyoming. Cheney was already removed from House Republican leadership last year after she voted for Trump’s impeachment and regularly denounced his conduct leading up to Jan. 6 and during the riot.

“I will do everything I can to ensure that the former president never again gets anywhere near the Oval Office,” Cheney said after she was removed from House leadership.

Cheney and Kinzinger remain among the few Republicans willing to criticize Trump for the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol by his supporters — and his unrelenting efforts to overturn the election. Cheney has taken an active and aggressive role on the committee, according to fellow members and aides.

Some of the party’s members are pushing the RNC to scuttle the motion, saying it would make for a messy internecine public fight instead of attacking Democrats or talking about the midterm elections.

Many of the party’s 168 members are Trump fans, and he remains the most potent force in the Republican Party.

Going the way of the Whigs and the Know Nothing Party in 1856?

Jennifer Rubin writes, Go ahead, RNC. Make my day. Launch a new party. This is how a third party can be born in America.

Ever since defeated former president Donald Trump took over the Republican Party, repudiated conservative values and reduced grown men and women to the role of hapless sycophants, disgusted former members of the GOP have been puzzling over how to compete with the only remaining pro-democracy party (the Democratic Party).

Now it seems they have an answer: Kick out the only sane members of the party. That’s what members of the MAGA cult plan to do at the party’s annual meeting in Salt Lake City this week. And they might just launch a new party that could break apart the GOP.

This is not the solution former Republicans may have envisioned. Many thought the party could be reformed from within. Remember all those essays about the “battle for the soul of the GOP”? It turned out the soul had been entirely gobbled up by the MAGA crowd, as became evident when only Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) could bring himself to vote to convict Trump in his first impeachment trial. If not then, the replacement of Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) as the No. 3 in House GOP leadership by the grotesquely ambitious Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) probably sealed the deal.

If the party could not be reformed from within, why not form a new party that could supersede the GOP as the second major political party? Alas, U.S. history, a phalanx of political scientists and virtually all smart operatives who would mount such an effort make a powerful case that this simply cannot occur in the American system, which is hostile to third parties. Only when one party collapses entirely (e.g., the Whigs) does a new party have a shot to replace it.

As 2020 demonstrated, the notion that the MAGA GOP could be obliterated failed to account for the very high floor (thanks to gerrymandering and deep-red states) that would prevent the Republican Party even in a bad cycle from going under.

And so the quandary continued: How could someone create an opening for a new, non-MAGA, sane party? Then, lo and behold, the GOP itself came up with the answer.

The Post reports: “A prominent Trump ally is pushing the Republican Party to formally expel Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger at the party’s annual meeting this week in Salt Lake City, setting up a public showdown over the party’s direction.” No! Oh, yes.

C’mon, RNC, do it! You could not possibly have people in your midst who refuse to rewrite history and who put democracy over the interests of a losing candidate. If you allow a couple of people to think that way, pretty soon there might be an entire faction of the GOP who won’t condone violence or coups!

Once Cheney and Kinzinger are booted, the next move is obvious: They can start their own party. (The Bull Moose Party? The Constitutional Republican Party?) No one can expect them to simply retire from politics. But they can continue their public service under a different banner that considers Washington, D.C. — not Mar-a-Lago — to be the seat of government. In fact, before they lose to the Trump-endorsed crazies in House, Senate and gubernatorial primaries, other non-MAGA Republican candidates can join the new party and get on the ballot.

It might be too much to hope for, but the RNC’s exiles can be the country’s pro-democracy pioneers. It’ll take a while to catch on, and sure, they might split the vote on the right and hand some seats to the Democrats. But over time, lots of candidates and voters might realize that they have a political lifeboat with principled people such as Cheney and Kinzinger at the helm.

Republicans have discovered, albeit unintentionally, something they could do to bolster our democracy. Go for it!

Riiight. The Never Trumpers have been talking about taking back the Republican Party from the personality cult of Donald Trump since 2015.  They have had years to do the hard work of establishing an opposition party and getting it qualified in all 50 states to appear on the ballot. They have not done this hard work.

Instead they regularly write columns about how the only pro-democracy party, the Democratic Party, must save the Republic from this nascent fascist movement in the GQP, and when it stumbles because of Vichy Democrats like Sens. Manchin and Sinema, they are critical of Democrats for not doing enough to save democracy in America.

They should look in the mirror and ask themselves, “what have you been doing for the past almost 7 years to save democracy in America?” Not enough. They keep waiting for someone else to do the heavy lifting. It’s up to them to do the heavy lifting. You had better do it now, before it is too late. Democracy hangs in the balance.

UPDATE: CNN reports, ‘Watered down’ anti-Cheney and Kinzinger resolution advances at RNC winter meeting:

Members of the Republican National Committee’s resolution committee unanimously passed a motion on Thursday to formally censure GOP Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger over their service on the House select committee investigating the January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol.

The resolution will advance to the full 168-member voting body for an up-or-down vote on Friday.

In the hours leading up to the vote Thursday, RNC members successfully lobbied sponsors of the resolution to water it down from a previous version that called for the expulsion of Cheney and Kinzinger from the House Republican conference. Citing concerns that the original draft went too far in its public rebuke of the two Republican lawmakers, sources told CNN that the language had been changed to ensure its passage out of the resolutions committee.

A separate effort to table the resolution failed to gather majority support earlier in the day, which paved the way for its consideration by the resolutions committee, according to a person familiar with the matter.

* * *

Cheney responded to the proposed resolution, saying it was a “sad day.”

“If the price of being willing to tell the truth and get to the bottom of what happened on January 6, and make sure that those who are responsible are held accountable is a censure, then I am absolutely going to continue to stand up for what I knew was right,” the Wyoming Republican told CNN. “And I think that it is a sad day for the party of Lincoln that that’s where we are.”

 

In a statement posted on Twitter, Kinzinger said, “Rather than focus their efforts on how to help the American people, my fellow Republicans have chosen to censure two lifelong Members of their party for simply upholding their oaths of office. They’ve allowed conspiracies and toxic tribalism hinder their ability to see clear-eyed.”

The Illinois Republican added that his efforts will “continue to be focused on standing up for truth and working to fight the political matrix that’s led us to this point.”





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