Kinzinger voted for, with Trump before turning
Republicans suddenly scurry away from president in his last weeks in office
Congressman Adam Kinzinger has won praise for resisting President Trump’s efforts to undermine the election results, but he voted for Trump in November and voted overwhelmingly with the president in his first two years in office. (One Illinois/Ted Cox)
By Ted Cox
U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Channahon has won praise for publicly resisting President Trump’s efforts to defy the results of the November election and remain in office.
But, admirable as that stance is, especially in trying to lead the Republican Party back into the mainstream political fold, it’s worth noting that in actual tangible actions he voted for Trump in November — and voted overwhelmingly with the president in Trump’s first two years in office.
Trump’s attempted putsch at the U.S. Capitol appears to have been a turning point for even the most conservative Republicans and all but the last Trump loyalists. Nikki Haley, former U.N. ambassador in the Trump administration, supported Trump unequivocally in the 2020 election and spoke at the Republican National Convention in August, but even she reportedly turned on the president this week, telling the party’s winter meeting, “His actions since Election Day will be judged harshly by history.”
Closer to home, the Chicago Tribune, which remains a proudly Republican newspaper on its opinion pages, finally turned on the president Friday, after Wednesday’s Trump-incited assault on the U.S. Capitol and the formal process to certify the election results. A Trib editorial called for the 25th Amendment to be used to declare Trump unfit for office, stating, “Trump needs to go.” But the Trib also resisted the impeachment case against Trump a year ago — in spite of overwhelming evidence the president coerced his Ukrainian counterpart to aid his reelection effort and then attempted to cover it up — instead calling for the president to be merely censured by Congress. The Trib also persistently resisted calls for it to demand Trump leave office earlier, in marked contrast with its calls for President Bill Clinton to leave office in the midst of the Monica Lewinsky scandal 22 years ago.
Calling for Trump to go less than two weeks before President-elect Joe Biden is set to be inaugurated is something less than a profile in political courage. Kinzinger was ahead of Haley and the Trib in calling out Trump for attempting to undermine the election results this fall, but it wasn’t until Trump’s phone call attempting to compel the Georgia secretary of state to “find 11,780 votes” for him — all the way back last weekend — that Kinzinger admitted reconsidering his actual vote to reelect Trump last November. Kinzinger was eloquent in criticizing the Capitol assault in an interview on “The Late Show With Stephen Colbert” this week, but he also had to admit he had voted against impeachment. And it wasn’t until Thursday that he came out in support of removing the president through the 25th Amendment.
In the midst of the chaos Wednesday, Kinzinger criticized those storming the Capitol, but he also allowed that he had been “upset” himself by the election results. Asked by Fox News what he would tell those up in arms over Vice President Mike Pence’s refusal to go along with an attempt to overturn the Electoral College, Kinzinger said, “You know we don’t live in Russia, we don’t live in a Third World country, we live in the greatest democracy in the world, and the thing that allows this democracy to work is an understanding that there is a process. Just because conspiracy theories are put out on Twitter does not mean in fact that the election was stolen. It doesn’t mean the Congress has the authority to unilaterally make a different decision on the election. If you’re outraged — and I was upset by how the election ended up — that’s why you make a case and you go out and convince people to vote for your side.”
Earlier in the week, on Monday, in an interview with Yahoo News, Kinzinger labeled Trump’s phone call last weekend “frightening,” adding, “I would say if I knew everything I know now, I’d probably think differently” about his vote cast in November. He insisted his support for the president had been “based on policy.”
On Trump’s policies, however, Kinzinger voted with Trump 99 percent of the time in the president’s first two years in office. That included the $1 trillion tax cuts to the very rich passed at the end of President Trump’s first year in 2017. The only time he broke with the president was in voting to impose sanctions on Russia, Iran, and North Korea.
Over the last two years, Kinzinger has broken with Trump more often, voting with the president 83.5 percent of the time, but that’s included voting against impeachment a year ago and against the HEROES Act coronavirus relief package last May, and supporting Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Climate Agreement and emergency spending on the Mexico border wall, while not casting a vote on a proposal to restore parts of the Voting Rights Act.
Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight website has a Trump Plus-Minus Rating comparing how often members of Congress voted with Trump, compared to how often might be expected given how the president did in the state or district in 2016. Kinzinger has registered a +4.6, meaning that he’s voted with the president even more often than might be expected, given his overall 91.7 percent record of voting with the president, and Trump’s carrying his congressional district by 17.2 percentage points. By that measure, however, he’s in the same range as U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, at +4.4, given that Pelosi voted with the president just 18 percent of the time, but in a district Trump lost by 77.5 percentage points. In effect, Kinzinger voted even more avidly for Trump policies than his 2016 vote total in the district might have indicated, while Pelosi displayed more political courage in the face of Trump in voting with him as often as she did, against the apparent preferences of her constituents.
Kinzinger has also voted repeatedly for U.S. Rep. Kevin McCarthy as House Republican leader, and McCarthy has proved to be one of Trump’s most loyal defenders. To his credit, Kinzinger did not join with the majority of Republicans in the House in voting to contest the Electoral College certification on Wednesday; only U.S. Reps. Mary Miller of Oakland and Mike Bost of Murphysboro did so among the Illinois congressional delegation.
Kinzinger also publicly backed Saudi Arabia following the brutal death and apparent dismemberment of American journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi embassy in Turkey in 2018, and he twice voted against congressional attempts to block arms sales to the Saudis in response — again in support of the president.
“We recognize killing journalists is absolutely evil and despicable, but to completely realign our interests in the Middle East as a result of this, when for instance the Russians kill journalists . . . Turkey imprisons journalists?” Kinzinger was quoted as saying. “It’s not a sinless world out there.”
No, it’s not, but others in Congress have been more consistent in opposing those sins — especially as committed by the president. It was obvious to many a year or more ago that Trump constituted a danger to the nation, but it wasn’t until this week that Kinzinger agreed.