Cheney, Larson united in alienation from GOP

Liz Cheney and Lyle Larson have a lot in common.

They are both Republican lawmakers with long, deep histories in party politics.

Cheney, the U.S. representative from Wyoming, has a father who served as vice president of the United States, a member of Congress and chief of staff for the late President Gerald Ford.

Larson, the San Antonio-based state representative, worked at 19 on his dad’s unsuccessful 1978 GOP campaign for Congress.

Both of them are stalwart, traditional conservatives. Cheney has a 91 percent conservative ranking from Heritage Action and 78 percent from the American Conservative Union.

Larson is so rooted in fiscal conservatism that he refused to accept a pay increase during his time on Bexar County Commissioners Court because he considered it a waste of taxpayer money. As a congressional hopeful in 2008, he advocated the Fair Tax, a conservative pipe dream that would replace the federal income tax with a 23 percent sales tax.

At the moment, Cheney and Larson are united by their shared political alienation. They are outcasts from their party, for reasons that have little to do with ideology.

Cheney simply committed the political sin of accepting the results of a 2020 presidential election in which President Donald Trump lost the popular vote by 7 million votes and the Electoral College by 306-232. She declined to participate in her party’s game of coddling Trump’s delusional claims the election had been stolen from him.

She particularly held Trump accountable for riling up an angry mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 as Congress was certifying the election results.

So Cheney is about to be stripped of her position as House Republican Conference chair.

Trump blasted her in a May 5 statement as a “warmonger,” presumably because she has supported a continued U.S. military presence in Afghanistan (a commitment that her father played a major role in initiating).

Trump wants Cheney replaced with New York Rep. Elise Stefanik. Trump apparently doesn’t view Stefanik as a warmonger, even though she shares Cheney’s position on Afghanistan.

In fact, Stefanik co-sponsored a 2019 bill calling for the U.S. to maintain at least 10,000 troops in Afghanistan.

Stefanik has a voting record that’s considerably less conservative than Cheney’s. In 2017, Stefanik criticized Trump’s decision to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, calling it “misguided” and saying he was “isolating us from our allies.”

That same year, Stefanik expressed her opposition to Trump’s defining 2016 campaign promise: the construction of a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Over the course of Trump’s presidency, however, Stefanik — like most of her GOP colleagues — made a cynical calculation. She came around to the idea that her political self-preservation demanded full-service fealty to Dear Leader. She helped lead the charge for Trump’s impeachment defense in January 2020 and has enthusiastically propagated the Big Lie that Trump was the true election winner in November 2020.

Stefanik will soon be rewarded for her shamelessness.

Cheney isn’t exactly immune to political pandering. Who can forget, during her disastrous 2014 run for the U.S. Senate, the way she publicly came out against gay marriage after privately supporting her sister Mary’s same-sex union?

Cheney drew the line, however, when it came to enabling Trump’s conspiracy mongering. In the current Republican Party, that’s an act of political suicide.

Larson, too, has shown a willingness to call out GOP leadership. In 2017, he crossed Gov.

Greg Abbott by filing an ethics bill that would have restricted Abbott’s ability to appoint his donors to state boards and commissions.

Abbott responded by vetoing five of the six bills Larson passed that year and endorsing Larson’s 2018 primary opponent, Hollywood Park’s then-Mayor Chris Fails.

That feud eventually passed, but Larson now finds himself increasingly at odds with a GOP caucus bent on culture-wars lawmaking.

He was the lone House Republican to vote in favor of a nobrainer Medicaid expansion budget amendment that would have provided health coverage to more than 1 million uninsured Texans.

This past week, he was again a voice in the wilderness, the lone House Republican to vote against a voter suppression bill that feeds Trump’s Big Lie.

In an elliptical May 6 tweet loaded with “Lord of the Rings” imagery, Larson said his party’s determination to pass the bill is an “unforced error that will haunt the GOP all the way back to Rhovanion.”

Larson wrote that party labels are standing in the way of good policymaking.

“Partisanship is the ill that plagues our state and nation,” he said. “We need to stop the nonsense of ‘my tree house’ mentalities.”

Cheney and Larson are exiles from the tree house, and they seem content with that.

Cheney

Larson