'The President Is Unfit:' Kinzinger Calls For 25th Amendment

CHANNAHON, IL — Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger on Thursday morning became the first Republican lawmaker to call for invoking the 25th Amendment. He urged Vice President Mike Pence and members of the cabinet to remove President Donald Trump from duty after a mob stormed the Capitol during the counting of electoral votes.

In a video posted on Twitter, Kinzinger said, "It’s with a heavy heart I am calling for the sake of our Democracy that the 25th Amendment be invoked."

The Channahon Republican, who has long been an outspoken critic of the president, said the blame for Wednesday's insurrection lies squarely on the president and others who have stoked the flames of unrest by continuing to claim, without evidence, that the presidential election was rigged.

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Even as Trump supporters mobbed the Capitol, the president continued to insist that the election had been stolen. In a video posted Wednesday afternoon that has since been removed by Twitter after the president's account was temporarily locked, Trump said, "We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election, and everyone knows it, especially the other side, but you have to go home now.

"We love you. You’re very special," the president added.

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"Sadly, yesterday it became evident that not only has the president abdicated his duty to protect the American people and the people’s house, he invoked and inflamed passions that only gave fuel to the insurrection that we saw here," Kinzinger said.

"Here’s the truth," Kinzinger added. "The president caused this. The president is unfit, and the president is unwell." He also said Trump is "unmoored not only from his duty but from reality itself" and that what happened Wednesday should be a wake-up call for the Republican Party.

"The Republican Party has got to get out of the business of culture wars," he said.

Kinzinger noted that the 25th Amendment has been invoked in the past when presidents underwent minor surgery because "even for that moment, to have the captain of the ship absent could cause a major catastrophe."

He called on the vice president and cabinet to invoke the amendment and assume the president's duties "so we have a sane captain of the ship."

U.S. Rep Brad Schneider (D-Deerfield), who represents the 10th Congressional District of Illinois, has also called for the 25th Amendment to be invoked, joining a growing number of representatives asking for Trump to be removed.

Rep. Lauren Underwood, a Naperville Democrat, has also said Trump's removal from office "must be immediate."

Late Wednesday, Kinzinger appeared on "The Late Show With Stephen Colbert," telling the late night host about the harrowing moments after Trump supporters breached the U.S. Capitol.

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Kinzinger said he had anticipated possible violence as Congress gathered to count electoral votes.

"I’ve been anticipating this for a while, so I didn’t have staff come in today," he said Wednesday night. "We're kind of under siege here. All you have to do is hear the words of the president talking about basically storming D.C. (and) convincing people that an election was stolen. If you truly believe an election was stolen and the government’s run by, you know, as QAnon believes, Satanist pedophiles, you can fully expect something like this to happen ... I knew it was coming."

Kinzinger said he was on the House floor but felt unsettled by Trump's speech to supporters earlier in the day as well as what he was seeing on Twitter.

"I made the decision to go back to my office, and I'm glad I did," he said, adding that his friends in Congress described the siege as a "surreal, end-of-time kind of movie."

"Thankfully, the strength of our constitution and democracy held, and we emerged a little battered, but resolved." Despite Wednesday's chaos, the election of Joe Biden as president and Kamala Harris as vice president was certified early Thursday morning.

Colbert also asked Kinzinger, who serves on the Committee on Foreign Affairs, about how the events of Wednesday will affect the way other countries see the United States.

"This is especially heartbreaking because I go to foreign countries a lot and talk about using us an example for the kind of democracy to build and aspire to," Kinzinger said. "I don’t know how I’m going to tell that message now, except that we rise from these ashes. If we rise from these ashes, we’ll have a better story to tell. If we continue to be mired in this kind of dysfunction, that’s not something we can brag about anymore."

Watch Kinzinger's statement calling for the 25th Amendment to be invoked: