Republican Reps Liz Cheney, of Wyoming, and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, “are taking a real political risk” by taking part in the House elect committee investigating the deadly January 6 Capitol insurrection, according to prominent conservative commentator Margaret Hoover.

Cheney and Kinzinger joined the select committee, which got underway Tuesday with its first hearing, at the invitation of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and after House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif) pulled his selections off the panel.

McCarthy pulled his selections after Pelosi vetoed two of them on the grounds that two of them took part in the attempt to decertify Joe Biden’s election on January 6 prior to the insurrection getting underway.

Pelosi created the select committee — which began its work Tuesday hearing from several police officers on the front line of the most violent insurrection since the Civil War — after Senate Republicans blocked a bipartisan commission to study the events of January 6 similar to the commission which investigated the September 11, 2001, attacks.

Mobs of violent Donald Trump supporters stormed the Capitol January 6, trying to overturn the lawful and legitimate certification of Joe Biden’s election as president in order to install Trump for an illegal second term in the White House.

In a highly unusual move in which a House leader publicly condemned his own members, McCarthy called Cheney and Kinzinger “Pelosi Republicans.”

The two lawmakers fired back calling McCarthy “childish.”

“It breaks my heart to say, yeah, it is a political risk. They are taking a real political risk by joining this [committee], but it’s a risk that’s among many other risks, noble, brave and morally courageous risks that they’ve already taken. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger have proved that they have absolute backbone to stand for their positions,” said Hoover, great-granddaughter of President Herbert Hoover and host of the PBS television program Firing Line. “The way the January 6 commission has been treated by the House Republican leadership going around undermining it, pretending they want a bipartisan bill, undermining it and lobbying in private against it, and has really — and then having it pass and suggesting that it’s partisan while doing everything they can to make it completely partisan has frankly succeeded in undermining the mission of the commission itself and diminishing it to what is perceived by Republicans now as a completely partisan witch hunt.

“So that even Republicans who are the good guys, the ones who voted for impeachment, some of them who are in really tight races — and by the way, they’re all in tight races, they all have primaries, some tougher than others — but it’s very difficult for a Jaime Herrera Beutler or a Dan Newhouse or a Peter Meijer to volunteer and sign up for this if they are really going to fight for their seats. What we’ve seen from Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger is they just don’t care. They’re willing to risk their seats, and they might.”

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