Editorial: Kinzinger's defense of our republic

The damage President Donald Trump has done to the health of American democracy by his attacks on our election system and his steadfast refusal to accept the results of the November vote will not soon be undone. His damage to the Republican Party seems barely short of irreparable.

The latest evidence of Trump's conversion of the party into a tool of his personal will came in the form of 126 Republicans who signed onto the outrageous Supreme Court appeal by the state of Texas seeking to dismiss the election results of four other states in blatant contradiction of not only Constitutional standards, as affirmed Friday by the court, but also of foundational states' rights principles of the Republican Party itself.

Among the signers, sadly, were two of Illinois' five Republican congressmen - downstaters Darin LaHood of Peoria and Mike Bost of Murphysboro.

The deep disappointment consuming the president and many of his followers is natural and understandable. It is felt every four years by at least one major candidate and his or her supporters. But the election of 2020 marks the only time in recent memory that a losing candidate, particularly a losing candidate who was president, put the electoral process itself under sustained assault. The result of Trump's relentless and baseless claims of widespread fraud has been a widening of the already gaping partisan chasm he fostered during his administration and, in the process, a validation among many of his voters of his unfounded and dangerous attacks on the very integrity of our elections and our government itself. It is one thing for a single individual to foster distrust in the institutions of government - even as troubling as it is when that person is the president of the United States - but it is bone chilling when two-thirds of the elected U.S. representatives from a major political party endorse such contempt, whether out of political cowardice, naked partisanship or some combination of the two.

If there is hope for the party, it may come, ironically, from a suburban congressman who is one of the most consistent supporters of President Trump's policies. According to fivethirtyeight.com, U.S. Rep. Adam Kinzinger of southwest suburban Channahon, has voted with President Trump more than 92 percent of the time during his two terms in Congress. Yet, repeatedly over the years and especially throughout the hail of tweets that Trump has rained down on social media since losing the election Nov. 3, Kinzinger has challenged the president and urged people to dismiss attacks on the political system.

"I want to be clear: the Supreme Court is not the deep state," he wrote in a tweet of his own on Saturday. "The case had no merit and was dispatched 9-0."

In a three-minute YouTube video posted Thursday, Kinzinger forcefully defends the election system and condemns efforts to delegitimize it. "While you may not like the election results, that doesn't make the election fake," he says at one point, then goes further to note, "Failing to accept this reality puts the country in a very dangerous moment in time."

He visited that latter theme in an interview with CNN on Nov. 25, when he worried that, "Over time, if you're continually told that there's conspiracies behind everything, that the government's run by a satanic cabal, that your vote doesn't matter, that the ballot boxes were stuffed, eventually you believe your vote doesn't count, and when you feel disenfranchised, that's what makes republics fail."

Kinzinger, in short, could be Exhibit A for the case that Americans can be simultaneously conservative and devoted to the principles that hold our nation together.

We're indebted to him for his defense of the republic. We're proud to say that he hails from the suburbs.

If his Republican Party is to emerge from the stain left by four years of assault and two months of relentless derision by its leader, it is the Kinzinger model - certainly not the Bost-LaHood model - it must adopt.