A controversial motion passed by the Republican National Committee to censure GOP Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger originally contained language that appeared to defend the actions of Capitol rioters as “legal”, it has emerged.
According to the New York Times, an early draft of the motion – which has caused consternation and drawn outrage both within and outside the party – originally censured Ms Cheney and Mr Kinzinger for joining “a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in nonviolent and legal political discourse.”
However, the language was at some point changed to remove the words “nonviolent and legal” and replace them with “legitimate”. The paper does not make clear who made the change or at what stage.
As the fallout from the censure resolution began to grow, one of the main talking points to come out of the RNC was that the “legitimate political discourse” line did not refer to the events of the 6 January protests and riot as a whole, but to a narrower subset of acceptable and legal actions by dedicated Trump supporters or Republican officials uninvolved in the insurrection whom the select committee is supposedly hounding without good reason.
This view, however, is not shared by all Republicans, and some of the party’s most senior elected officials have openly disavowed it.
Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader who is frequently the target of bitter resentment from Donald Trump, said on Tuesday that the attack on the Capitol was not “legitimate”, but instead a “violent insurrection for the purpose of trying to prevent the peaceful transfer of power, after a legitimately-certified election, from one administration to the next.”
He also laid into his own party for censuring Ms Cheney and Mr Kinzinger, saying that it is “not the job of the RNC” to be “singling out members of our party who may have different views of the majority”.
The hundreds of people arrested for their part in the riot are still working their way through the criminal justice system. Many have pleaded guilty to minor misdemeanours or felonies, while others have accepted plea bargains to avoid lengthy custodial sentences. Many cases have been simplified by the colossal quantities of video footage from the riot, most of it shot by the rioters themselves.
