Chuck said a couple of other House 'yes' votes on impeaching Trump backed out of the interview. Kinzinger's poison, it seems, especially now that he's launched Country1st.com, a PAC calling itself "a home for principled Americans who are tired of the poisonous extremism that has overtaking our beloved nation's politics."
He said "it's really difficult" being the face of the anti-Trump GOP; lots of people, including family members, have turned on him. And even though he's been accused - twice - of being possessed by the devil, he's undeterred.
...let's take a look at the last four years, how far we have come in a bad way. How backwards looking we are, how much we peddle darkness and division. And that's not the party I ever signed up for. And I think most Republicans didn't sign up for that.
Even given that, he said it's invigorating to stand up for what he believes in. And, the question of whether the GOP can survive without Trump is the right question to ask. He thinks the focus on getting reelected is the wrong approach, and that there's a leadership problem in the party. That includes House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy trotting off to Mar-a-Lago, further tying Trump and the party together, and feeding his desperation to stay relevant. They "they shouldn't be a Trump-first party, they should be a country-first party."
And we need to quit being the party that even one iota defends an insurrection, a dead police officer and other dead Americans on the Capitol. There is no equivalency to that. And we have to run from that as fast as we can.
Chuck talked about Dems having a hard time engaging with the Rs; he quoted Rep. Dan Kildee of Michigan, who said
I have a hard time interacting with those members right now. Especially with those I had a closer relationship with. I'm not going to deny the reality that I look at them differently now. They're smaller people to me now.
And, he asked, how can the Rs - "the party that's defending the Marjorie Taylor Greenes of the world" - "lecture" the Dems on bipartisanship? Kinzinger agreed, saying the GOP "has lost its moral authority..." They can fight back, defend their principles, of course, but
when I ask people now what is a conservative principle, how many people think that conservative principles are things like just build the wall and, you know, charge the Capitol and have an insurrection?
Kinzinger said he'd "certainly vote her off committee" but he's unsure about kicking Marjorie Taylor Greene out of the House; voters have a right to choose who they want to represent them, he said.
On impeachment, he gets that some Senators are looking for an easy way out by using a process argument, that you can't impeach someone who's out of office, but it's not the time for that.
...this is a red line in American history.... ten of us in the House took the tough vote... What we can't say, Chuck, is in the last two months of a president, you can do whatever you want, including incite a mob to insurrection, because it's just too late in the process to convict you.
They need to send a message, "that people like Donald Trump can never hold that office again."
Down the hall to the right, Chris Wallace asked Sen. Bill Cassidy about the COVID-19 relief package put forward by 10 GOP Senators, and about bipartisanship. On the latter he disagreed with comments from a Biden official that the administration reached out, and said that
if you want unity, if you want bipartisanship, you ought to start with the group that's shown it's willing to work together for a common solution. They did not.
And on the former? The R's plan is smaller, and "very targeted to the needs of the American people, treating our tax dollars as if they're our tax dollars." The group met with Biden and VP Kamala Harris at the White House today.
The big differences between the new plan and the $1.9T Biden plan? They offer only $20B towards education this round, vs. $170B from the administration. He said that parochial schools have opened with much less money, and that
putting 170 billion towards teachers' unions priorities takes care of a Democratic constituency group but it wastes our federal taxpayer dollars for something which is not the problem... We can get kids back to school without kind of bailing out the teachers unions.
Another change he didn't mention was completely removing the $15/hour federal minimum wage proposal. He did say that the direct stimulus payment is only $1000 this time, and it has a lower max income before it starts phasing out.
If you notice, there's been very good analysis that above a certain income level, that money's not spent. Now it may pay down debt and we've seen credit card delinquency go down, mortgage delinquency go down, savings rates go up. But that doesn't stimulate the economy... Our money goes to that income level where we know it will stimulate the economy and theoretically that's what they actually want.
Back to bipartisanship, Wallace wondered about getting a COVID deal done via reconciliation, if that's the only way they can get it done.
If you say you want bipartisanship and you want unity and you want Republicans to join and then you have a budget reconciliation, which is chock-full of handouts and payoffs to Democratic constituency groups – and by the way, policies which will kill millions of jobs, which is what CBO says raising minimum wage to $15 would do in normal times, nothing like today -- you don't want bipartisanship. You want the patina of bipartisanship what you want to stick it and ram it through. So that's not unity.
In my opinion, the fact that ten GOP senators came up with a counter-proposal, and the next day are meeting with the president, is a miracle compared to what happened over the past four years, when then-president Trump refused to even talk with, much less meet with, Democrats. We're light-years ahead of that already, less than two weeks in.
Wallace asked the senator what he thought of a "the election was stolen from me" impeachment defense, and whether there should be a delay as Trump lost his attorneys over the weekend. (He did replace them late yesterday.) Cassidy said he'll wait to see the evidence and make his judgment on what's presented. He said it's his understanding that
the evidence is going to focus on whether or not the president contributed to an atmosphere to have people charged the Capitol, break-in, threatening, if you will, both members of Congress and Vice President Pence. That's the charge. So I would hope that whatever defense is put up refutes that charge.
He's not sure on the delay, noting that the whole thing "is obviously uncharted territories for multiple reasons," adding
I always thought the president had insufficient time to come up with a rebuttal. This makes it perhaps even more insufficient. But in a sense, it might be the president, I don't know that for sure, who has contributed to this so I think this needs to be worked out. There's probably better ways to handle it than we currently are. I hope those are explored.
That's where we'll leave the classroom discussions for this week.
See you around campus, masks (and hats, mittens, scarves, and boots) on.
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