What Will and What Won’t Get a Republican Censured by the Republican National Committee

The Hill reports: 

Members of the Republican National Committee’s (RNC) resolutions committee on Thursday unanimously passed a resolution to censure Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), though they declined to call for Cheney and Kinzinger to be expelled from the House Republican Conference.

The resolution’s passage was confirmed to The Hill by two sources familiar with the matter. The RNC’s full body will likely vote to approve the censure on Friday at its winter meeting

The resolution criticizes Cheney’s and Kinzinger’s involvement in the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, of which they are the only two Republican members.

“This is not about them being anti-Trump,” Harmeet Dhillon, a national committee member from California and one of the sponsors of the resolution, told Politico. “There are plenty of other people in the party who are anti-Trump whose names don’t appear in the resolution. These two took specific action to defy party leadership.”

While serving on the committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol will get a Republican member of Congress formally rebuked by the RNC, the committee never considered censuring Arizona GOP congressman Paul Gosar for his decision to speak at a conference hosted by a Holocaust denier and white supremacist. Georgia GOP congresswoman and conspiracy theorist Marjorie Taylor Greene’s decision not to apologize for saying that Nancy Pelosi was guilty of a “crime punishable by death” did not earn her a censure from the RNC. (Yes, yes: There are also bad Democrats who have not been rebuked by the Democratic party.)

Mitt Romney and Bill Cassidy, two GOP senators who voted to convict Trump during his second impeachment trial, are not pleased with the RNC’s move: