US Representative Liz Cheney’s dogged pursuit of former US president Donald Trump over last year’s riot at the US Capitol has cemented her status as the sole Republican to gamble her career as she breaks ranks with her party in the fight for US democracy.
It is looking like a near-certain losing bet for the 56-year-old congresswoman — for now, at least — as she is set to relinquish her seat representing Wyoming in the US House of Representatives to a Trump-endorsed conspiracy theorist.
A daughter of former US vice president Dick Cheney — and once seen as the tax-cutting, gun-loving, God-fearing, small-government apotheosis of US conservatism — Liz Cheney has become a pariah in her own party.
Photo: AFP
Her refusal to accept Trump’s false claims of a stolen 2020 election put her on a collision course with modern Republicans, who booted her out of the leadership and have disowned her at home in the “Cowboy State.”
Cheney was one of just 10 Republicans in the House to vote to impeach the former president for inciting the insurrection on Jan. 6 last year.
Yet Washington-watchers are speculating that her widely expected defeat to Harriet Hageman in yesterday’s Wyoming Republican primary will mark a beginning rather than an end.
Cheney has not ruled out the possibility of a tilt at the presidency in 2024, either by taking on Trump in the race for the Republican nomination or by running as an independent.
“I haven’t made a decision about that yet. I’m obviously very focused on my re-election. I’m very focused on the Jan. 6 committee. I’m very focused on my obligations to do the job that I have now,” she said during an interview with ABC News.
In her closing argument for the primary campaign, she sounded like someone looking beyond Wyoming to a bigger stage.
“The lie that 2020 presidential election was stolen is insidious. It preys on those who love their country... This is Donald Trump’s legacy, but it cannot be the future of our nation,” she said in a video posted online last week. “History has shown us over and over again how these types of poisonous lies destroy free nations.”
Despite being defeated by US President Joe Biden, Trump retains an iron grip on the Republican Party, which in February adopted as part of its official policy platform the falsehood that the mayhem at the Capitol constituted “legitimate political discourse.”
“They say January 6 won’t be much of a voting issue in 2022. Perhaps,” conservative US political commentator Bill Kristol wrote on Twitter on Monday.
“But it was in fact a defining moment for the country, and whether we take it seriously or not, today remains a defining question for us as a country. Liz Cheney takes it seriously. We all should,” he wrote.
Only one other Republican, Adam Kinzinger, has joined Cheney’s rebellion — but the young Illinois congressman has chosen to retire rather than fight for re-election. Both have been tarred as “RINOs” — “Republicans in name only” — by colleagues with far less conservative voting records.
Other Republican lawmakers have tried to walk a fine line between condemning Trump’s role in the bid to overthrow the 2020 election — including the storming of the Capitol — and staying in his good graces.
Not Cheney.
“The president of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack,” she said as she explained why Trump deserved blame for the insurrection — reprising word-for-word a withering assessment she first deployed during Trump’s second impeachment.
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