This morning’s vote to remove Liz Cheney from her position as the third-ranking Republican in the House brings a close to the debate Cheney touched off, and offers the party an opening to move on. It assures a caucus leadership that reflects where the rank-and-file are. And it frees Cheney to make her case without concern for the responsibilities of her previous position. If House Republicans are actually serious about the one defensible argument for this vote — that the party needs to stop talking about Donald Trump and the 2020 election if it is to succeed in the 2022 midterms and beyond — then it should pick a replacement for Cheney who wants to talk about neither of those topics, and Kevin McCarthy should have the spine to make his caucus stick to the “that’s all over with” approach to the 2020 election that he took today at the White House.
Cheney should not, however, be purged from the party for telling the truth about the 2020 election. To the contrary, if anyone gets kicked to the curb, it should be the people who persist in perpetuating lies about the election. And those of us who are in the business of ideas rather than the business of electoral politics should insist, whenever the topic arises again, that the truth is preferable to such lies. The 2020 presidential election was far from flawless, and in some places it was conducted in flagrant disregard of the law. But it was not stolen, and anybody who continues to claim otherwise should be seen in the future as an unreliable liar.
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