When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams — this may be madness. Too much sanity may be madness — and maddest of all: to see life as it is, and not as it should be! – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra
Dark water rising and rising some more. Storm, the storm pushes closer. The danger is real. You are all Don Quixote. And you are all each other's dragon. Me, I'm just a windmill.
By 2020, awfully late for anybody with enough sense to leave the house alone, it had become evident to Kinzinger Trump lacked not only a moral center but also deal‐cutting expertise. That shortcoming rankled Kinzinger, who won his seat in 2010 on the Tea Party wave. Picture sodden debris everywhere. During the Obama administration, Kinzinger’s Republicans became the Party of No. No to Obamacare. No to deficits. No to raising the debt ceiling. Six years of that, and then the Trump administration and . . . No replacement of Obamacare. No infrastructure package. Only waging culture wars and claiming the president was the victim of a partisan witch hunt.
The broader concern, Adam - named after the first white man - would lament, is that nobody, including myself to be honest, knows any different than just being the opposition to everything. Because since I’ve been in politics, and I’m one of the older guys now, that’s all we’ve done. There’s never been real deal‐cutting.
But in the wake of the Capitol riot, the Tea Party wave now a tsunami, Kinzinger’s concern about the health of his party extended well beyond its legislative failings. The biggest danger right now is, he would say in late January 2021, we’ve become a party that dabbles— not just dabbles: we traffic in conspiracies. And we traffic in lies.
Kinzinger was among the ten House Republicans to vote to impeach the president— and then, less than a month later, among the eleven in the GQP Conference to vote to strip Marjorie Taylor Greene of her committee assignments. She continued to present a conundrum for him and other Republicans. Do they call out Greene’s lies one by one and risk giving her the attention she craved? Or do they ignore her and run the risk her lies might become THE KUDZU THAT SWALLOWS UP THE PARTY'S SOUL?
Kinzinger tried both approaches. Neither seemed entirely effective. The committeeless Georgia freshman lived all day on social media, while Kinzinger had professional responsibilities to attend to.
For placing him and other Republicans in this quandary, Kinzinger blamed Kevin McCarthy. The minority leader had gone silent while Greene and her ilk conflated the insurrection and the summer riots of 2020. Soon, McCarthy, too, would be speaking of the two separate events in the same breath.
Kinzinger had publicly condemned the lootings and burnings that accompanied Black Lives Matter protests. Still, he said, You could have burned down the entire city of Minneapolis and it wouldn’t threaten the very foundations of democracy like this did.
Meanwhile, Kinzinger couldn’t help but notice McCarthy defended Greene’s standing among Republicans with greater vigor than he defended Liz Cheney. Of course, Trump despised Cheney and adored Greene. McCarthy in turn believed Trump’s support was essential to win back the House majority.
But, Kinzinger wondered, what kind of majority would it be, with Greene and her friends in the Freedom Caucus— which Kinzinger derisively referred to as the Freedom Club— commanding all the power? This, he believed, was a problem to address now, while they were in a minority and frankly had nothing else constructive to do. McCarthy should be marginalizing the nuts, not indulging them. There would be no time to do so once the House Republicans became the governing party in January 2023.
Kinzinger on a tiny island of integrity dark waters lapping at his feet, knew he lacked any leverage. Many of his like‐minded conservative colleagues— Will Hurd of Texas, Martha Roby of Alabama— had seen this trend coming and headed for the exits. Others, perhaps even the majority in the conference, sympathized with Kinzinger’s viewpoint but did not want to risk losing their jobs by saying so. As for McCarthy, he left a message for Kinzinger following the minority leader’s appeasement pilgrimage to bend a knee and kiss the ring at Mar‐a‐Lago in late January. But Kinzinger had not returned the call. He already knew where the leader stood: beside a former president who continued to say victory had been stolen from him. The leader stood beside a loser.