Tom Rice of South Carolina says of his vote to impeach ‘I have a duty to uphold the constitution’ as he faces tough primary
One of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump over the deadly Capitol attack insisted the former president should be consigned to the political past, even as Trump attracted headlines with a Senate race endorsement, in his continued attempt to control the GOP.
“Bring on the circus,” Tom Rice of South Carolina told the New York Times. “You know, some people are afraid of clowns. I’m not afraid of clowns.
“He’s the past. I hope he doesn’t run again. And I think if he does run again, he hurts the Republican party. We desperately need somebody who’s going to bring people together. And he is not that guy.”
Trump this week called Rice a “backstabbing Rino” – an acronym for “Republican in Name Only” – and said: “He lifted up his hand and that was the end of his political career – or we hope it was.”
Rice and nine other House Republicans voted to impeach Trump for inciting the attack on the Capitol, an attempt to stop certification of Joe Biden’s election victory which a bipartisan Senate committee linked to seven deaths.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/jun/11/tom-rice-republican-impeach-trump-vote