Liz Cheney Digs In, as Support Sinks over Blunt Trump Talk

I t’s official: Liz Cheney is — for the second time in 2021 — the most controversial member inside the House GOP conference.

This is a rather remarkable achievement considering the competition.

There’s Matt Gaetz, who is reportedly “being investigated by the Justice Department over whether he had a sexual relationship with a 17-year-old and paid for her to travel with him.”

There’s Marjorie Taylor Greene, who promoted anti-Semitic and deranged QAnon conspiracy theories. Greene also said in a 2019 speech (uncovered by CNN earlier this year) that Nancy Pelosi is guilty of “a crime punishable by death . . . treason” and liked a Facebook post saying a “bullet to the head” would be a quicker way to remove Pelosi — behavior for which Greene has never apologized.

Then there’s Cheney, who . . . continues to say out loud that the 2020 election wasn’t stolen, that Donald Trump’s lies caused the violent attack on Congress on January 6, and that Donald Trump therefore shouldn’t be the leader of the Republican Party.

“I think she’s got real problems,” House minority leader Kevin McCarthy said during a hot-mic moment before an appearance Tuesday on Fox News, as reported by Axios. “I’ve had it with her. You know, I’ve lost confidence. . . . Well, someone just has to bring a motion [to remove her], but I assume that will probably take place.”

If McCarthy’s comments are an attempt to pressure Cheney to resign voluntarily, they seem very unlikely to succeed. A source familiar with her thinking tells National Review there’s no chance Cheney will step down. If House Republicans want her out, they’re going to have to hold yet another vote — likely next week — to do it.

But why is this the moment at which McCarthy and his GOP colleagues want to give Cheney the boot?

Just three months ago, 70 percent of the GOP conference, including McCarthy, defeated an attempt to oust Cheney because of her impeachment vote. Before the caucus voted to keep her, Cheney delivered a speech in which she refused to apologize for her anti-Trump rhetoric or that vote. McCarthy did not lend Cheney his support only on the condition she would shut up about January 6.

Cheney’s scorching rhetoric blaming Trump for causing the January 6 attack on Congress was not all that different from Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell’s condemnations of Trump. Nor was the substance all that different from the rhetoric of Kevin McCarthy, who said on January 13 that Trump “bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters.”

McCarthy, though, has been all over the map on the 2020 election. In November, he said that “President Trump won this election, so everyone who’s listening, do not be quiet. . . . We cannot allow this to happen before our very eyes.” Two weeks after he said Trump “bears responsibility” for the January 6 riot, McCarthy went to Mar-a-Lago for a photo op with Trump.

Cheney’s problem is her consistency. A leader telling the truth about Trump, the 2020 election, and January 6 — as McConnell did — is apparently something that can be tolerated once or twice within the congressional GOP ranks. Perhaps Cheney might still be allowed to timidly and apologetically express polite disagreement about the legitimacy of the election and the cause of the January 6 riot. But she continues to speak her conscience without equivocation — whether she’s asked about it by reporters or in response to new statements by Trump asserting the election was stolen.

“If a prerequisite for leading our conference is continuing to lie to our voters, then Liz is not the best fit,” Congressman Anthony Gonzalez of Ohio, one of the ten House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump, told The Hill in a recent interview. “Liz isn’t going to lie to people. Liz is going to say what she believes. She’s going to stand on principle. And if that’s going to be distracting for folks, she’s not the best fit. I wish that weren’t the case.”

To be more precise, the House Republicans who recently turned against Cheney don’t want her to deliberately lie about Trump. They just want her to move on and leave it in the past — so they can focus exclusively on beating the Democrats in 2022.

“We all need to be working as one if we’re able to win the majority,” Kevin McCarthy said during his Tuesday appearance on Fox News. McCarthy’s belief that Cheney’s rhetoric about Trump could depress the GOP base in 2022 is plausible. But it’s also plausible that ousting Cheney could send a message to the moderate anti-Trump swing voters the GOP needs to win back that they’re not wanted.

The problem with the argument to leave the 2020 election and January 6 in the past, as Cheney sees it, is that this debate is a critical issue in the present and a potentially existential issue in the future.

If Trump — who, in 2024, would be the same age as Joe Biden was in 2020 — runs again, wins the nomination, and legitimately loses the general election, there would likely be yet another attempt to overturn the results, only with greater intensity.

“If we minimize what happened on Jan. 6th and if we appease it,” Cheney said in an interview with Politico last week, “then we will be in a situation where every election cycle, you could potentially have another constitutional crisis.”

“You can’t bury our head in the sand,” she continued. “It matters hugely to the survival of the country.”