The Riverside Press-Enterprise
Liz Cheney is ready to lose, but she's not ready to quit
Republican faces Trump-backed challenger in strongly conservative state
CHEYENNE, WYO. » It was just over a month before her primary, but Rep. Liz Cheney, Rwyo., was nowhere near the voters weighing her future.
Cheney was instead huddled with fellow lawmakers and aides in the Capitol complex, bucking up her allies in a cause she believes is more important than her House seat: ridding American politics of former President Donald J Trump and his influence.
“The nine of us have done more to prevent Trump from ever regaining power than any group to date,” she said to fellow members of the panel investigating Trump’s involvement in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack. “We can’t let up.”
The most closely watched primary of 2022 has not become much of a race at all. Polls show Cheney losing badly to her rival, Harriet Hageman, Trump’s vehicle for revenge, and the congresswoman has been all but driven out of her Trump-loving state, in part because of death threats, her office says.
Yet for Cheney, the race stopped being about political survival months ago. Instead, she’s used the Aug. 16 contest as a sort of high-profile stage for her martyrdom — and a proving ground for her new crusade. She used the only debate to tell voters to “vote for somebody else” if they wanted a politician who would violate their oath of office. Last week, she enlisted her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, to cut an ad calling Trump a “coward” who represents the greatest threat to the U.S. in the history of the republic.
In a state where Trump won 70% of the vote two years ago, Liz Cheney might as well be asking ranchers to go vegan.
“If the cost of standing up for the Constitution is losing the House seat, then that’s a price I’m willing to pay,” she said in an interview last week in the conference room of a Cheyenne bank.
The 56-year-old daughter of a politician who once had visions of rising to the top of the House leadership — but landed as vice president instead — has become arguably the most consequential rank-and-file member of Congress in modern times. Few others have so aggressively used the levers of the office to seek to reroute the course of American politics — but, in doing so, she has effectively sacrificed her own future in the institution she grew up to revere.
Cheney’s relentless focus on Trump has driven speculation — even among longtime family friends — that she is preparing to run for president. She has done little to dissuade such talk.
In the interview, she said she was focused on her primary — and her work on the committee. But it’s far from clear that she could be a viable candidate in the current Republican Party, or whether she has interest in the donor-class schemes about a third-party bid, in part because she knows it may just siphon votes from a Democrat opposing Trump.
Cheney said she had no interest in changing parties: “I’m a Republican.” But when asked if the GOP she was raised in was even salvageable in the short term, she said: “It may not be” and called her party “very sick.”
The party, she said, “is continuing to drive itself in a ditch, and I think it’s going to take several cycles if it can be healed.”
Cheney suggested she was animated as much by Trumpism as by Trump himself. She could support a Republican for president in 2024, she said, but her red line is a refusal to state clearly that Trump lost a legitimate election in 2020.
In Cheyenne, she channeled the worries of “moms” and what she described as their hunger for “somebody who’s competent.” Having once largely scorned identity politics — Cheney was the only female lawmaker who wouldn’t pose for a picture of the women of the 116th Congress — she now freely discusses gender and her perspective as a mother.
“These days, for the most part, men are running the world, and it is really not going that well,” she said in June when she spoke at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California.
She has no post-congress political organization in waiting and has benefited from Democratic donors, whose affections may be fleeting. To the frustration of some allies, she has not expanded her inner circle beyond family and a handful of close advisers. Never much of a schmoozer, she said she longed for what she recalled as her father’s era of policycentric politics.
“What the country needs are serious people who are willing to engage in debates about policy,” Cheney said.it’s all a far cry from the Cheney of a decade ago, who had a contract to appear regularly on Fox News and would use her perch as a guest host for Sean Hannity to present her unswerving conservative views and savage former President Barack Obama and Democrats.
Today, Cheney doesn’t concede specific regrets about helping to create the atmosphere that gave rise to Trump’s takeover of her party. She did, however, acknowledge a “reflexive partisanship that I have been guilty of” and noted that Jan. 6 “demonstrated how dangerous that is.”