CHENEY SAYS SHE WON’T QUIT THE HOUSE AFTER WYOMING CENSURE
WA SHINGTON» Rep. Liz Cheney, the third-ranking House GOP leader, said Sunday she was undeterred by a censure from Wyoming Republicans and criticism from some House colleagues over her vote to impeach Donald Trump, and will not resign or back off her repudiation of the former president.
Cheney said the oath she took to the Constitution compelled her vote for impeachment, “and it doesn’t bend to partisanship, it doesn’t bend to political pressure.”
She suggested that if she were in the Senate, she might vote to convict Trump over his role in the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol. Trump’s trial in the Senate begins Tuesday.
“I would listen to the testimony — I would listen to the evidence,” Cheney told “Fox News Sunday.” “I obviously believe and did then that what we already know is enough for his impeachment.
What we already know does constitute the gravest violation of his oath of office by any president in the history of the country, and this is not something that we can simply look past or pretend didn’t happen or try to move on.”
“We’ve got to make sure this never happens again,” she said.
On Saturday, the Wyoming Republican Party voted overwhelmingly to censure Cheney. Only eight of the 74-member state
GOP’s central committee opposed the punishment in a vote that did not proceed to a formal count. The censure document accused
Cheney of voting to impeach Trump, even though the House didn’t offer him “formal hearing or due process.”
That followed a 145-61 secretballot vote this past week in the nation’s capital in which House Republicans overwhelmingly rebuffed a rebellion by hard-right conservatives to toss Cheney from leadership over her impeachment vote.
“We need to honor President Trump. All President Trump did was call for a peaceful assembly and protest for a fair and audited election,” said Darin Smith, a Cheyenne attorney who lost to Cheney in the Republican primary for the House seat in 2016. “The Republican Party needs to put her on notice.”
Cheney has said repeatedly she voted her conscience in backing impeachment for the riot, which followed a rally where Trump encouraged supporters to get rid of lawmakers who “aren’t any good, the Liz Cheneys of the world.”
Far from leading a peaceful demonstration, Trump “summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack,” Cheney said in a statement before the Jan. 13 impeachment vote. About twothirds of House Republicans voted to back Trump’s effort to overturn his November election loss — just hours after his supporters’ deadly siege of the Capitol.
“People have been lied to,” she said Sunday. “The extent to which the president, President Trump, for months leading up to Jan. 6 spread the notion that the election had been stolen or that the election was rigged was a lie.”