Liz Cheney pays a heavy price for telling the truth — but is she just the first?
Sometimes the sacred halls of Congress sound like the raucous corridors of an unruly grade school.
On the same day that House Republicans used a secret vote to purge Rep. Liz Cheney, a Wyoming Republican, from their leadership, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a notoriously buffoonish Georgia Republican, put on a separate show.
“Hey, Alexandria,” she heckled the famously progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New York Democrat, outside the House chamber, according to witnesses. AOC kept walking away as MTG reportedly called her a “radical socialist” and other rude labels.
The episode marked enough of a breach of House decorum that Illinois Republican Adam Kinzinger was moved to scold MTG via Twitter:
“While I may not agree with @ AOC on issues,” he tweeted, “I’ve never seen her confront a colleague like this.” The House, he added, “was created to debate emotional issues professionally, and it seems some just want attention or cannot handle their emotions.”
Taylor Greene responded with Donald Trump-style cheekiness, calling the Air Force veteran who served in Iraq “Little Adam” and insisting that all she wanted was an honest debate with AOC about issues.
Right, forget all those niceties about decorum and comity and Robert’s Rules of Order. If anything, “owning the libs” with all the grace of a herd of Twitter trolls is what matters most to her noisy wing of loyal Trump supporters.
Sure, she may act like a clown sometimes but, the more she gets criticized the more she gets noticed — and, again in Trumpian fashion, the more bucks she rakes in from supporters who see her as giving voice, however shrill, to their own simmering dissatisfaction.
MTG raised over $3.2 million in the first three months of this year, according to Politico, compared with the $728,000 raised by AOC in her first quarter in office in 2019.
Freshman Taylor Greene’s fundraising success, a reward for her bombastic style, makes Liz Cheney’s eloquent appeal to reason sound downright poignant. In an op-ed before the vote and in a speech from the House floor she rebuked Trump for his false claims of election fraud and his role in inciting the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, as if such old-fashioned virtues as truth and expertise still counted for something.
“I am a conservative Republican and the most conservative of conservative values is reverence for the rule of law,” she wrote in her Washington Post op-ed. “The Republican Party is at a turning point and Republicans must decide whether we are going to choose truth and fidelity to the Constitution.”
Fat chance of that. Her political goose was cooked and she knew it. After all, she was addressing the same House Republicans who voted against certifying the election, even after the Capitol riot.
And polls showed a majority of Republicans, despite the confirming counts and recounts, believe the election was stolen from Trump.
Joining the flight from unpleasant realities, Republican members of the House Oversight Committee after the Cheney vote devolved into partisan bickering.
Rep. Andrew Clyde, a Georgia Republican, went so far as to say that, while “there were some rioters,” it was a “boldfaced lie” to call it an insurrection. Rather, he said, it was more like a “normal tourist visit.” Having visited the Capitol on numerous occasions, I find most normal tourists to be better behaved.
But Cheney’s loss of her leadership post and the jeopardy that now clouds her House seat — and Kinzinger’s — as next year’s midterms approach reveals a big reality: Republican incumbents have to play along with reality as Trump sees it — or is selling it — or risk losing their seats too.
And, what happens if we have another Trump presidential run in 2024 — and the results in critical electoral states is even closer than last time? Will we see more browbeating of state election officials who try to cling to something so quaint and arguable as facts?
Of course, it also is possible that voters outraged by the blizzard of lies turn out in massive numbers to demand an honest count and real accountability. Otherwise, we might as well turn the whole schoolhouse over to the class clowns — or, as Rep. Clyde might put it, the visiting “tourists.”