Rep. Adam Kinzinger, one of the Republican lawmakers who publicly denounced former President Donald Trump for his conduct after the presidential election, created a super PAC that will back Republicans not wedded to the former president.
Kinzinger, the 42-year-old congressman from Illinois’s 16th Congressional district, broke the news of the Country First PAC during a Sunday morning interview on Meet the Press. The PAC will be dedicated to distancing his party from Trump.
Kinzinger previewed the launch a day earlier with reporters on a Zoom call while calling out colleagues who are close supporters of the president, according to the Washington Post.
Kinzinger took shots at freshman Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, whose conspiracy-laden social media history includes doubting the veracity of mass shootings, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the promotion of anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, as well as House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy for not doing enough about Greene. Greene and McCarthy are set to meet this week, and dozens of Democratic lawmakers have called for her to be expelled from Congress.
Kinzinger also rebuked McCarthy for saying that Trump “bears responsibility” for the deadly attack on Jan. 6 at the Capitol in the days after it happened but then flipping his tune and meeting with the former president at Mar-a-Lago last week.
“That’s a heck of a move in about three weeks. It’s hard to square that circle,” Kinzinger said of the situation, before insinuating that McCarthy isn’t the head of the party. He said Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, an ardent Trump defender, was the leader of the caucus “for sure,” and he called the Ohio lawmaker and his allies “political terrorists.”
“The former president is desperate to continue to look like he’s leading the party. And the problem is until we push back and say, you know, this is not a Trump-first party, this is a country-first party,” Kinzinger told Meet the Press anchor Chuck Todd. “In some cases, you may support Donald Trump in that effort. But in my case, I believe that that’s a whole new movement. Until we all kind of stand up and say that, we are going to kind of be chasing our tail here in this situation.”
Kinzinger was one of 10 House Republicans to vote to impeach Trump for inciting an insurrection. Those Republicans, including House Republican Conference Chairwoman Liz Cheney, have faced significant backlash from the party and from constituents for supporting the president’s unprecedented second impeachment.
The Senate is set to begin the trial portion of the impeachment proceedings next week. It appears destined to fail, given that it takes a two-thirds majority to convict. Last week, 45 Republican senators voted to drop the impeachment trial, claiming it is unconstitutional because Trump is out of office. Five Republican senators, including Sens. Mitt Romney of Utah, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, Ben Sasse of Nebraska, Susan Collins of Maine, and Patrick Toomey of Pennsylvania, who is retiring, all of whom have publicly criticized the president for his role in the postelection conspiratorial phase, voted with the Democrats.
