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My statement on the RNC censure. I am now even more committed to fighting conspiracies and lies: pic.twitter.com/NzKK2s2kkC

— Adam Kinzinger (@AdamKinzinger) February 4, 2022

This is far from the first time Cheney and Kinzinger have faced GOP blowback for how directly they’ve been willing to confront Trump’s lies about the 2020 election results. Previously, House Republicans removed Cheney from leadership for her criticism of Trump, and a GOP organization in Illinois has censured Kinzinger for similar reasons. Cheney also faces a primary challenge from Trump-backed attorney Harriet Hageman for her Wyoming House seat, while Kinzinger has opted not to run for reelection.

The censure, while a rare move, won’t affect Cheney’s or Kinzinger’s current roles in the House. A prior version of the resolution could have had more of an impact: It urged House Republican leadership to kick both members out of the conference. That would have put McCarthy in the difficult position of deciding whether to remove both members, something the House Freedom Caucus has pushed for before, too.

The final version simply criticizes their actions. Ultimately, the censure serves mainly to reaffirm the message that many Republicans aren’t interested in confronting Trump about his role in contesting the election and stoking the January 6 insurrection. If anything, many intend to give their full support to what he says, no matter how dangerous or untrue.

The censure is emblematic of Trump’s influence on the Republican Party

The passage of the resolution is indicative of how many Republicans continue to back Trump and his views.

In fact, the resolution specifically mentions Trump, rebuking Cheney and Kinzinger for working on the committee alongside Democrats, arguing that they “support Democrat efforts to destroy President Trump more than they support winning back a Republican majority in 2022.”

Based on the success of Friday’s vote, most in the RNC appear to share this view. But there is a small group of moderate Republicans who used the vote to make it clear they disagree with the party’s unwillingness to take on Trump and call out the severity of the January 6 insurrection.

Sens. Mitt Romney (R-UT) and Bill Cassidy (R-LA) were among those who questioned why Republicans were pursuing this censure. Former RNC party chair Michael Steele decried the censure as a “pathetic act of cowardice.” And current RNC member Bill Palatucci said the censure was a “distracting sideshow,” which followed the RNC’s failure to condemn participants in the January 6 attack.

“Shame falls on a party that would censure persons of conscience, who seek truth in the face of vitriol,” Romney wrote in a Twitter post.

Shame falls on a party that would censure persons of conscience, who seek truth in the face of vitriol. Honor attaches to Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger for seeking truth even when doing so comes at great personal cost.

— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) February 4, 2022

The RNC is censuring Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger because they are trying to find out what happened on January 6th - HUH?

— U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy, M.D. (@SenBillCassidy) February 4, 2022

Loyalty to Trump is set to play a role in the midterms

The censure also foreshadows the role that loyalty to Trump is likely to play in the upcoming midterm elections.

Cheney is among the Republican incumbents facing a primary challenge due to their opposition to Trump. The RNC this week also ratified a rule that enables it and the Wyoming Republican Party to financially support Hageman, the candidate challenging Cheney. Other Trump critics including Reps. Tom Rice (R-SC), Fred Upton (R-MI), and Jaime Herrera Beutler (R-WA) are set to face Trump-backed primary challengers because of their vote to impeach him in January 2021. As the New York Times reports, the incumbent candidates have so far been able to out-raise their opponents.

Trump’s endorsement could play a significant role in crowded primaries for open Senate seats in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and North Carolina. In the past, loyalty to Trump has been a factor in a number of House and Senate primary races, and many — though not all — of his endorsed candidates have won. In 2020, Trump’s backing appeared to help former football coach Tommy Tuberville beat former Sen. Jeff Sessions in an Alabama Senate primary, and buoyed House candidates like Lisa Scheller in Pennsylvania.

In a handful of races, however, his endorsement hasn’t been enough to secure victory. In Texas, Susan Wright lost a special election runoff despite having the former president’s backing, and in a North Carolina House district, Lynda Bennett lost a Republican primary.

That hasn’t stopped candidates from vying for Trump’s endorsement. That’s because, particularly in races in which the incumbent has a cash advantage, Trump’s backing is seen as a powerful way to boost one’s fundraising and legitimacy. And as Friday’s censure proves, it is also a way to signify one’s status as a “true Republican.”

Cheney and Kinzinger’s censure, ultimately, is indicative of how much the Republican Party continues to value allegiance to Trump, sending a signal to candidates and voters ahead of the midterms.

  1. | Maddie Meyer/Getty Images

Beijing’s opening ceremony featured Vladimir Putin, thousands of Chinese teenagers, and a lot of loaded politics.

The Beijing Winter Olympics kicked off to an expectedly weird start, thanks to the unprecedented challenges presented by the Covid-19 pandemic. Directed by legendary Chinese film director Zhang Yimou (who also directed the 2008 Beijing opening ceremony), this year’s opening ceremony focused on visual spectacle, with giant LED screens covering the floor and lining the stage, and no celebrity entertainers.

Facing a diplomatic boycott from many countries over its human rights violations, including the US — meaning the United States sent no official government envoy to the Games but its athletes are competing as usual — China took a low-key approach to this year’s opening ceremony. But inevitably, the tense geopolitics surrounding the event snuck in.

The production, which dovetailed with the Chinese New Year spring festival, included about 3,000 performers, most of them teenagers, and emphasized peace, world unity, and the people around the world who have battled the pandemic. The unifying aesthetic was about as peaceful as you could get: snowflakes.

In the buildup to the ceremony, China had encouraged athletes to sign a “truce mural” with other nations. The government also rolled out a massive winter sports initiative prior to the Games, claiming it had successfully engaged more than 300 million Chinese citizens in winter sports participation, especially targeting kids and teens. The ceremony emphasized these citizens above all else, with no famous singers or actors performing — a first for any Olympics in recent memory.

This was due perhaps in part to the difficulty of coordinating live celebrity performances while Beijing is still under a period of intense lockdown due to the pandemic. It happens to be in accord with China’s year-long “QingLang” campaign to rein in the status of celebrities and their fans — a sweeping attempt to control both the undue influence of idols as well as their often out-of-control fandoms.

It’s in keeping with China’s messaging since the pandemic began: We’re all in this together, getting through this together, thanks to the tireless commitment of “ordinary heroes” like volunteers and essential workers — who had to execute China’s draconian (though highly successful) Covid policy. Since 2021 was the Chinese Communist Party’s 100th anniversary, that narrative has also aligned with a heavy emphasis on the importance of youth to carry the nation (and Chinese communism) into the future.

That theme played heavily into the opening ceremonies, from the presence of seas of cute children smiling and singing onstage to a video featuring kids not much older than toddlers skiing and skating to the passing of the Olympic torch. For the cauldron lighting, Chinese athletes born in succeeding decades passed the torch along to one another, ending with two athletes born in the 2000s (one of whom embodied a message to the world, but more on that in a second).

Throughout the parade of nations, happy volunteers jumped, danced, and waved alongside the competing Olympic athletes alongside a backdrop of utterly inoffensive European classical music. A bucolic snowflake aesthetic dominated the presentation, apparently emphasizing not the uniqueness of every snowflake, but the calm uniformity of the collective snowfall awaiting spring. Easy to imagine it all as a metaphor for the commonality of the global Olympics audience as we all await an end to Covid surges. At one point, roller skaters made idyllic snowflake patterns to the tune of John Lennon’s “Imagine.”

Despite the banal quality of it all, the scene still held political tension. Viewers watching the NBC live feed of the ceremony got plenty of glimpses of Vladimir Putin, isolated in Russia’s box, attending the event despite being embroiled in a border standoff with Ukraine that threatens to overshadow the Games and their focus on global unity.

As Chinese President Xi Jinping looked on, in the final moments, the Olympic torch was passed to 21-year-old cross-country skier Dinigeer Yilamujiang, who is a member of China’s Uyghur ethnic minority. Human rights experts have accused the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) of detaining millions of Uyghurs in forced human labor camps in Xinjiang; the US State Department has described the actions as genocide and alleged China is committing other crimes against humanity like rape, forced sterilization, and torture.

China has claimed, despite significant evidence to the contrary, that the camps don’t exist, that workers’ labor is voluntary, and that accusations to the contrary are “the lie of the century.” So the decision to prominently feature Yilamujiang to end the opening ceremony is a deeply political one — and one that will significantly complicate the message of unity conveyed in the Olympics’ opening ceremony. (Yilamujiang isn’t the first Uyghur athlete to carry the torch for China; Kamaltürk Yalqun, who carried the torch at age 17 in the 2008 Olympics, now lives in the US and has spent years protesting China’s persecution of the Uyghurs.)

China also welcomed separate delegations from Taiwan (competing as the “Chinese Taipei” team) and Hong Kong, despite its attempts to bring those regions more tightly into its orbit and its emphasis on a “One China” policy. As Yale professor Jing Tsu explained during NBC’s coverage, these contradictions are somewhat inherent to China’s political strategy: The country doesn’t necessarily expect to change minds, globally, with its message — but still, it is a clear one: unity, the future, and peace on earth. “We’ll see if there are any takers,” Tsu said.

Still, it’s always worth noting that China and its people are not a monolith, nor are they synonymous with the CCP and its human rights abuses — whatever the CCP might want you to think. While China’s Olympic delegation obviously got the biggest cheer of the night from the hometown crowd, the Beijing Olympics Committee stressed a warm welcome to all the participating nations, from the Mexican athletes wearing Day of the Dead jackets to the solo American Samoa delegate who arrived shirtless, fully Vaselined, and ready to play.

Perhaps the opening ceremony did remind us of one thing: No amount of strange precedence or geopolitical tensions can fully suppress the thrilling and unexpected pleasures of the Olympics, from the weird and wacky to the groundbreaking and heroic. Let the Games begin!

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