Biden: Seems Republicans seek identity
President Biden argued Wednesday that the push to purge Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney from the GOP shows Republicans are going through a “significant” identity crisis as they scramble to figure out former President Donald Trump’s role in their party.
Biden, who’s usually reluctant to comment on the other side’s internal business, said he doesn’t relish the Republican infighting over Cheney, who’s facing likely removal from House leadership because of her willingness to criticize Trump.
“It seems as though the Republican Party is trying to identify what it stands for, and they’re in the midst of a significant sort of minirevolution,” Biden said at the White House. “I’ve been a Democrat for a long time. We’ve gone through periods where we’ve had internal fights and disagreements. I don’t remember any like this . ... We badly need a Republican Party. We need a two-party system. It’s not healthy to have a one-party system.”
It appears all but certain that Cheney will be stripped of her post as the No. 3 Republican in the House in light of Trump and congressional GOP brass throwing their support behind upstate New York Rep. Elise Stefanik’s hard-right bid to take her place in the party’s leadership. Stefanik, a die-hard Trump ally, has mounted the challenge against Cheney because of the Wyoming congresswoman’s refusal to stop condemning the ex-president’s false insistence that the 2020 election was rigged against him.
In effect, Republicans, including top-ranking members like House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, are signaling that they value loyalty to Trump over the truth.
It also didn’t help Cheney with the Trump loyalists of her party that she fist-bumped Biden and held a brief conversation with him on the House floor when he arrived for his first joint address to Congress last week. Biden, who marked his 100th day as president last week, admitted he thought the Republicans would’ve moved beyond Trump by now.
“I think the Republicans are further away from trying to figure out who they are and what they stand for than I thought they would be at this point,” he said.