Don’t expect Cheney to back down
No one can mistake Liz Cheney for a moderate Republican; she’s red, and bred GOP, to the bone.
Praised the U.S. Supreme Court for striking down Roe v. Wade.
Voted with President Donald Trump 93 per cent of the time.
But the Congresswoman from Wyoming, which Trump won by nearly 70 per cent in the 2020 presidential election, his widest margin in the country, is evidence that at least one Republican has a shred of integrity.
That’s a moral triumph for Cheney, despite her landslide loss in Tuesday’s House Republican primary, to an unscrupulous opponent who formerly supported Cheney, criticized Trump — she called him “racist and xenophobic” — then went all-in-Trump, when the former president’s lieutenants settled upon her as their pick to unseat Cheney, daughter of a Wyoming political dynasty, her father the former vice-president Dick Cheney, monumentally loathed by progressives.
Cheney drew Trump’s wrath, and we all know how venomous Trump’s ire can be, by voting for his impeachment, by becoming Trump’s most dogged detractor, by indefatigably calling out his lies, and by taking a marquee role with U.S. House Select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, as its vice-chair.
Trump brought all his toxic, GOP-debauching powers to endorsing Harriet Hageman, a candidate of zero political substance, a long-time trial lawyer, best known for siding with ranchers, energy and mining interests in the least populated state in America, an anti-environmentalist, opposed to rules protecting land, water and endangered species.
Cleaving to her grievance-sodden political godfather, Hageman proclaimed at her victory rally in Cheyenne: “We’re fed up with the Jan. 6 commission. We’re fed up with Liz Cheney.”
Of the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for inciting the Capitol riot, only two remain in contention, heading
into the midterm elections. Four opted to retire, rather than face Trump-anointed challengers in the primary stage, and four have already been defeated in intraparty faceoffs with Trump-consecrated acolytes.
Gleeful over Cheney’s trouncing, Trump released a statement, crowing about the “wonderful result for America,” slamming his nemesis for her “spiteful, sanctimonious words.”
Well, he’d know from spiteful and sanctimonious …
Let’s add deceitful and criminal and pathological!
And still Cheney comes through the fire with her honour intact, burnished even.
Setting up the three-time Congresswoman (until January) as the anti-Trump conscience of a party that has fouled itself in shameless servitude to a megalomaniacal cretin, who continues to tease about running again.
It’s that flirtation which holds lawmakers in fearful thrall, although Trump can clearly wield a hammer from the sidelines, crushing dissent. Just as he’s now running victory laps for annihilating Cheney.
A spokesperson and adviser to Trump, Taylor Budowich, put it thusly to the New York Times: “She may have been fighting for principles. But they are not the principles of the Republican Party.”
Truer words were never spoken.
Because the Republican Party, shape-shifted by Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, has no principles.
The party of Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant has become a demented mutilation of its historical foundations.
It was no happenstance that Cheney, formerly a rising star in the party, until McCarthy stripped her of the No. 3 leadership post in the House, evoked Lincoln in her concession speech, twice referring to the Civil War.
“Lincoln was defeated in elections for the Senate and House before he won the most important election of all.”
Lincoln and Grant had “saved our Union,” said Cheney, who added: “We must not idly squander what so many have fought and died for.”
Earlier she’d described the Republican Party as “very sick” and likely requiring “several cycles,” to relocate its essence, after despotic Trump tried — he succeeded in large part — to undermine fundamental American democracy by trying to steal an election, by hook and by crook.
What’s stunning to the rest of the world is that Trump’s baseless fabrications continue to resonate within the party and among Republican voters who steadfastly support him in the polls.
It’s as if they’ve all drunk the
Kool-Aid, even if holding their noses while doing so.
On the morning after her lopsided defeat, Cheney hinted in an interview on NBC’s “Today” show that she’s considering a White House bid. “It’s something I’m thinking about, and I’ll make a decision in the coming months.”
She’d get eaten alive by the party conclave, of course, although she might elect to run as an independent.
Wouldn’t that be worth the price of admission, watching her in a debate with Trump?
An independent gambit, however, would likely drive NeverTrumpers away from the Democrats as an alternative.
Cheney’s more significant impact would be to continue pounding Trump, and his chosen, from the outside, as a focused force of resistance, just the way she shrivelled him down to size on the Jan. 6 committee.
The broader electorate should be in her crosshairs, their stubbornly eyes-wide-shut now pried open to Trump Baby’s manifest repulsiveness, even as more chickens come home to roost: the FBI raid on Mar-aLago; the seizure of classified documents Trump had no right to remove from the Oval Office; and, on Thursday, the chief financial officer of his namesake real estate company pleading guilty to tax violations, in a deal that would require him to testify about illicit business practices at the corporation.
Trump can’t pluck this sliverembedded deep in his creepy flesh.
Cheney has already submitted a filing with the Federal Election Committee to establish a leadership PAC under the name “The Great Task,” again, an echo of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The PAC is essentially an anti-Trump entity, signalling that she won’t go away. She also still has more than $7 million in her primary funding chest to keep that ball rolling, its aim to educate Americans about the continuing threat to democracy, and, according to a spokesperson, “to mobilize a unified effort to oppose any Donald Trump campaign for president.”
Trump has created a monster antagonist, a woman who won’t cower, who speaks truth to deviant power, and who will hound him to the gates of hell.
By many measuring sticks, Cheney is no paragon of virtue, at least not on the Democratic side of the divide.
But Cheney’s aversion to Trump is genuine, clear-eyed and righteous.
Just like the Tom Petty song that played when she left the concession podium in Wyoming.
“Well, I won’t back down “No, I won’t back down “You could stand me up at the gates of hell
“But I won’t back down.”