Today is Primary Day in Wyoming. Liz Cheney is the state’s sole congressman. On Election Day 2020, President Trump won 70 percent of the vote in Wyoming. That was his highest total in any state. Cheney won her House race with 73 percent of the vote.
Immediately after the election, Trump began his attempt to overturn the national result. On January 6, a mob attacked the U.S. Congress, for the purpose of stopping a constitutional process. (They succeeded for several hours.) It was the worst attack on our capitol since the War of 1812 — and that long-ago attack was carried out by a foreign power.
On January 13, Liz Cheney voted to impeach Trump. She was one of only ten Republicans to do so.
Naturally, Trump, Peter Thiel, and the rest of the big guns in the GOP have made special targets of the “traitorous ten.” That is a coinage of the day. Some of us consider the Republicans in question more like the “faithful ten” — faithful to the Constitution and their oath of office.
Nonetheless, Trump & Co. are winning, big-time. One by one, the ten GOP impeachers have bowed out of politics or been defeated in primaries. Cheney will probably go down today.
I think of an Agatha Christie title: “And Then There Were None.”
That was a pretty gutsy thing to do: vote to impeach a president of your own party, after he won 70 percent of the vote in your state. I admire Liz Cheney.
• Cheney was No. 3 in the Republican House leadership. That didn’t last long. She was kicked out and replaced by Elise Stefanik, a New York representative who had a reputation as a moderate. (Cheney was, and is, a conservative.)
The important thing was loyalty to Trump — Stefanik had it, Cheney didn’t. Stefanik campaigned for the leadership job by going on the talk shows of Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka. That lets you know where the juice is in today’s GOP.
A Republican congressman from Ohio, Anthony Gonzalez, had a comment:
“If a prerequisite for leading our conference is continuing to lie to our voters, then Liz is not the best fit. Liz isn’t going to lie to people. Liz is going to say what she believes. She’s going to stand on principle. If that’s going to be distracting for folks, she’s not the best fit. I wish that weren’t the case.”
Very well said.
• Cheney voted for an independent commission to investigate January 6 — a commission modeled on the 9/11 commission. Each party would have chosen five private citizens to compose a panel of ten. In the House, 35 Republicans voted for an independent commission — bucking GOP leader Kevin McCarthy et al. But Republicans succeeded in killing the commission in the Senate.
In the stead of such a commission, a congressional committee was empaneled. As Cheney noted on the opening day of the January 6 hearings — ongoing — every member of the congressional committee would have preferred an independent commission. Every member of the congressional committee voted to have one.
But an independent commission was not to be. So . . .
Said Cheney, “We cannot leave the violence of January 6th — and its causes — uninvestigated.” She also said, “If those responsible are not held accountable, and if Congress does not act responsibly, this will remain a cancer on our constitutional republic, undermining the peaceful transfer of power at the heart of our democratic system.”
Further words from Cheney:
“I have been a conservative Republican since 1984 when I first voted for Ronald Reagan. I have disagreed sharply on policy and politics with almost every Democratic member of this committee. But, in the end, we are one nation under God. . . . When a threat to our constitutional order arises, as it has here, we are obligated to rise above politics.”
For months now, Republicans have claimed that the January 6 hearings are a “circus,” a “show trial,” and so on. I’m inclined to respond: They wish. The hearings have been conducted with sobriety, with gravity — which is not necessarily the norm in Congress. Many of the witnesses have been Republicans, and many of those have been alumni of the Trump administration.
If the hearings are conveying false things, people can step forward and contradict those things. Under oath. Any takers?
An oath — the penalty of perjury — sobers people up.
• Today, Cheney will likely be defeated by Republican candidate Harriet Hageman. In the past, Hageman supported Cheney. “I know Liz Cheney is a proven, courageous, constitutional conservative, someone who has the education, the background, and the experience to fight effectively for Wyoming on a national stage.”
That was in 2016 — the Before Times. In 2022, Hageman is saying, “Absolutely the election was rigged.” She means the presidential election of 2020. And remember what Congressman Gonzalez said: “Liz isn’t going to lie to people.”
Which renders her PNG — persona non grata — in GOP-Land.
• In a speech at the Reagan Library in June, Cheney said, “We have to choose, because Republicans cannot be loyal to Donald Trump and to the Constitution.” That is pretty stark — and correct, I think. What is the popular phrase, in GOP-Land? “Binary choice.”
• About the Russian assault on Ukraine, Cheney is absolutely clear, in my judgment. In May, she co-authored an article with Jake Auchincloss, a Democratic congressman. They began,
As a Republican congresswoman from Wyoming and a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, we have firsthand experience with the partisan clashes in Washington. The two of us have frequently been on opposite sides this term, including on national security issues such as President Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan, which one of us (Cheney) opposed and the other (Auchincloss) supported.
But on the issue of Ukraine, there is no daylight between us. And there should be no partisan divide among members in Congress. It must be the policy of the United States that the strategic objective in Ukraine is victory for a free and democratic Ukraine, and defeat for Vladimir Putin. The strength of our democracy here at home depends on it.
Most Republicans, I find, are relatively quiet on Ukraine. I know people who used to be flaming Reaganites — who talked of freedom, democracy, and human rights in every other breath — who are now pretty much mum on Ukraine. Why? In brief, because the people whose approval they want are not enthusiastic about the Ukrainian cause. To put it mildly.
• “Why can’t Cheney just shut up about January 6?” That is a question I’ve heard from many, many people — from Republicans, I mean, and not necessarily Trump-enthusiastic ones. “Why can’t she just shut up about the 2020 election? Why can’t she move on? Why did she join Team Pelosi?!”
The “team” Cheney is on, when it comes to January 6, is the team of finding out the truth and telling it straight.
Cheney thinks that January 6 is very important, as she has explained repeatedly, and with remarkable patience. In the same vein, she thinks that the Trumpian lie about the election is very important. According to polls, a majority of Republicans believe the lie — believe that the Democrats, perhaps in cahoots with the Venezuelans and the Chinese, stole the election from Trump.
This affects our politics, and infects our politics. It infects our society as a whole. It led to the attack — the physical assault — on the U.S. Congress. It poisons everything.
Cheney thinks there needs to be an honest accounting of the past, yes. People ought to be held responsible. But she also believes the truth needs to be established for the sake of the future: to prevent future manipulation and future explosions of violence.
She thinks that Donald Trump remains a grave threat — a threat to our constitutional and democratic health. He is, after all, the frontrunner for the GOP nomination in 2024.
There are election “deniers,” of course — millions of them. But there are also election sweepers-under-the-rug. Cheney has a problem with both camps. And they with her.
• Obviously, Trumpers hate her. But you know who might hate her even more? Anti-anti-Trumpers. In my observation, Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, the other Republican member of the January 6 committee, are their two most hated GOP congressmen. Maybe their most hated congressmen, period!
Occasionally, they may be embarrassed by Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Paul Gosar, and other such GOP-ers. But I don’t sense any hatred of this type. You might get an eye-roll. But of “Liz ’n’ Kinz,” to use a phrase I’ve heard? Hatred.
How to explain it? Well, I could write several paragraphs. But it may suffice to say that everyone hates the one guy in the room who’s not gettin’ high. He has broken solidarity. He has committed a kind of betrayal.
Anyway . . .
• I mentioned 2024. Will Cheney run for president? I don’t see how. I don’t see how she can run in the Republican Party. I don’t see how she can run in the Democratic Party — she is a conservative, after all. Her father’s daughter. Independent campaigns are fool’s errands. Ditto third parties.
• On the subject of father and daughter: I think I will long remember the sight of Liz Cheney and Dick Cheney, absolutely alone on the Republican side of the House chamber. This was during the commemoration of the January 6 attack on the first anniversary, in 2022. Adam Kinzinger was not present because his wife was giving birth.
• Something else that will stay in my memory is a statement that Liz Cheney made at the beginning of the January 6 hearings: “I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.”
• When I was in college, I took part in a politics program, in Washington. Our group leader was a veteran Hill hand. He said to us, “The No. 1 goal of every congressional office is the reelection of the member.” That kind of shook our idealistic selves.
Henry J. Hyde, the longtime congressman from Illinois, used to give a speech to incoming GOP House freshmen. He had a theme: What are you willing to lose your seat over? Here is some of what he said on November 29, 1990:
This may sound odd, even ironic. You are here in the flush of victory. And yet it is precisely now that I ask you to contemplate the possibility of defeat — perhaps even the necessity of defeat.
Edmund Burke, in 1774, set forth a model we should all emulate when he told his Bristol constituents: “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement, and he betrays instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.”
Let me put the matter plainly: If you are here simply as a tote board registering the current state of opinion in your district, you are not going to serve either your constituents or the Congress of the United States well.
Your constituents expect you to represent their interests, and that you should certainly do. But you are also a member of the Congress, and your responsibilities are far greater than those of an ombudsman for your district. You must take, at times, a national view, even if, in taking that view, you risk the displeasure of your neighbors and friends back home.
Indeed, I feel obliged to put the matter more sharply still: If you don’t know the principle, or the policy, for which you are willing to lose your office, then you are going to do damage here.
This institution needs more members willing to look beyond the biennial contest for power, more committed to public service as a vocation rather than merely a career.
In my view, Liz Cheney has shown courage, something rare in politics, as in other departments of life. I don’t care whether she gets just two votes in Wyoming — her parents’. I’ve seen a lot of good people lose. Liz Cheney, by her conduct in the last year and a half, has rendered a patriotic service. If she never does anything else in the public sphere — she has done a lot.