Cheney no longer recognized by Wyoming GOP
Representative has criticized Trump as inspiration behind Jan. 6 Capitol riot
Rep. Liz Cheney was 12 when she traipsed across Wyoming with her father to help him win the state’s lone seat in the House of Representatives. Nearly 40 years later, it was her turn. She won her father’s old seat in 2016 to carry on the Cheney family’s reign in the Wyoming Republican Party.
“I’ve been in politics a long time,” she said last year. “It’s in my blood.”
On Saturday, just a little more than five years after Cheney scored that first congressional win, Wyoming Republicans disavowed her and called on their national counterparts to excommunicate her from the party entirely. Cheney has one of the most conservative voting records but has repeatedly taken friendly fire over the past year for criticizing Trump over his role in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. And so, over the weekend, her fellow Wyoming Republicans offered what not long ago would have been a stunning rebuke of former vice president Dick Cheney’s daughter: The state GOP’s central committee voted 31-29 to no longer recognize her as one of their own, the Associated Press reported.
In their resolution, central committee members called on Republican leaders in the House of Representatives to yank her from all committee assignments and excommunicate her from the GOP altogether “to assist and expedite her seamless exodus from the Republican Party,” according to the Casper Star-Tribune.
Cheney’s spokesman clapped back, calling it “laughable” to suggest she was anything but a “committed conservative Republican.”
“She is bound by her oath to the Constitution,” spokesman Jeremy Adler told The Washington Post in an email. “Sadly, a portion of the Wyoming GOP leadership has abandoned that fundamental principle, and instead allowed themselves to be held hostage to the lies of a dangerous and irrational man.”
Cheney’s criticism of Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol started immediately. Within hours, she blamed Trump for forming and unleashing the mob. Less than a week later, she was one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for his role in the riot.
“The president of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack,” Cheney said in a statement at the time, adding, “There has never been a greater betrayal by a president of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.”