House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has sought to clarify his stance on the Republican National Committee’s motion to censure Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for participating into the inquiry into the 6 January Capitol attack. Speaking to a reporter on Capitol Hill, Mr McCarthy insisted that the motion’s language describing “legitimate political discourse” did not apply to the riot, but to a handful of unspecified GOP officials who are supposedly being hounded by the select committee on which the two censured Republican members sit.
He still takes a very different position than his Senate counterpart Mitch McConnell, who yesterday condemned the events of 6 January as a violent insurrection – and remarked that “The issue is whether or not the RNC should be sort of be singling out members of our party who may have different views from the majority. That is not the job of the RNC."
Meanwhile, the right-wing media and various Republican legislators are loudly proclaiming that Joe Biden wants to hand out “crack pipes” and set up “injection sites” around the country in response to the administration’s drug harm reduction plan. Fox News hosts have dwelled on the story for hours of broadcast time, leading the Department of Health and Human Services to decry much of the coverage as “blatant disinformation”.
