A member of the Winnebago County Republican Party Central Committee wants the board to censure U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) for his vote to impeach former President Donald Trump for inciting insurrection.
“I don’t think that was appropriate,” Austin Davies, an attorney, told the Rockford Sun. “I don’t think [Trump] incited insurrection. What the House put in their resolution doesn’t even form a prima facie case against the president for inciting any kind of insurrection.”
Davies has drafted a censure resolution and plans to present it to the county GOP on Tuesday, Feb. 9.
A censure is a “public expression of disapproval – kind of a warning to the person being censured, that they need to stop the behavior they were engaging in,” Davies said.
Other county GOP committees in Illinois are also considering similar censure proposals, Davies said.
In Wyoming, the Republican Central Committee in Carbon County voted to censure U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney for voting to impeach Trump, stating that “no evidence exists that President Trump ever called for a violent response to political opposition.”
Kinzinger disagrees.
“On Jan. 6, 2021, the president of the United States encouraged an angry mob to storm the United States Capitol to stop the counting of electoral votes,” he said in a news release. “This angry mob turned violent and caused destruction to our nation’s symbol of democracy. This insurrection led to countless injuries and the death of several people, including two of our U.S. Capitol Police officers.”
The congressman said there is “no doubt in my mind that the president of the United States broke his oath of office and incited this insurrection.”
In 2016, Davies supported U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) over Trump for the GOP presidential nomination.
“Trump had no track record in politics,” Davies said. “I didn’t know if I could trust him to do conservative things. I did not support him in the primary.”
There were some things Trump did as president that Davies didn’t like.
“But he did a lot of good,” Davies said. “Based on that and on who the opposition was, I gladly supported him this time around. I have never been a MAGA guy but I supported a lot of what the (former) president did.”
His efforts to censure Kinzinger are not motivated by his support of Trump, the Winnebago County attorney said.
“It’s done against Kinzinger for something he did that I think was wrong and I think was unconstitutional,” Davies said.
