A Conservative with Conscience: Liz Cheney is the Conservative Of the Year
Representative Liz Cheney Has Shined a Light on the Moral Bankruptcy of the Republican Party
In an alternate universe, we would think of Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) very differently, but she’d still be linked to the forty-fifth President of the United States.
In this universe, the Presidential election of 2020 was just a smidge closer. The combined margin of around 43,000 votes by which Joe Biden carried the states of Georgia, Wisconsin, and Arizona was reversed and President Trump narrowly won them leading to a political geek fantasy: a 269-269 electoral college tie.
Under the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, the Vice-Presidential race is decided by the Senate. The result of that would be simple enough. The GOP would have at least a 51-48 majority. Mike Pence would be elected Vice President.
The resolution of the presidency is more complicated. The election would go to the House where the Democrats hold a slim majority. However, the election is determined by a vote of state delegations. The Democratic Party majority is based in huge clusters of Congressmen from places like California and New York. However, California and New York each only get one vote, the same as the single-representative Congressional delegations of Alaska, Delaware,Vermont, and Wyoming. The Republicans control twenty-six delegations, with twenty-one for the Democrats, and three tied.
There’s no indication that any sitting Republican House member would have voted against Trump in the question of whether Trump or Biden should be President. Cheney herself had made clear that she voted for Trump and certainly she’d vote to re-elect him. For better or worse, as the clinching vote, she’d been inexorably linked to Donald Trump as she is in ours. Her vote would be a moment of triumph for the MAGA movement.
Today, in our world, she finds herself inexorably linked to President Trump because of her steadfast refusal to cave to the demands of those who supported the former President’s attempt to overturn an election he clearly lost.
The events leading up to January Sixth were a stress test for our nation’s institutions. Those who minimize these events of that day think the GOP proved it was alrigh Across the country, Republican election administrators provided an accurate count, Republican Secretary of States and Governors dutifully certified election results, and more than eighty percent of Senate Republicans rejected the groundless challenges to the electoral votes of Arizona and Pennsylvania.
While this is true, there are ugly signs across the country. Republican State and County parties are rebuking officials who merely did their duty and certified the results of elections. Local functionaries who certified elections have been replaced by party lackeys, and many Election Administrators are being harassed into retirement.
Most disturbing of all, 147 House Republicans-a supermajority of that caucus. voted to overturn the results of a duly completed Presidential election even after the January 6th riots.
Those of us who were concerned about Trump’s authoritarian ways were assured in 2016, that Republicans in Congress would be a check on his ambitions. However, non-Trumpist Republicans retired in huge numbers in 2018 and 2020. Of the rest, most became used to keeping their heads down, lest Trump unleashed a mean tweet and the deplorable hordes set upon them and their families.
Not all were cowed into complete submission. While no Republican who wasn’t retiring would oppose Trump, Several Republicans would push back when they felt it was merited including Cheney, the House Republican Conference Chair, the number three member of the House Republican leadership.
When it came to holding Trump to account via Impeachment in 2021, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) set the caucus free to vote their conscience. Despite death threats and the risking the ire of their constituents, ten House Republicans voted to impeach President Trump. Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) refused to call the Senate back before Trump left office and then when the trial began, he refused to convict on the grounds that Trump had left office.
There was an effort to remove Cheney as Conference Chair for votting for impeachment but McCarthy opposed it and the motion was defeated. In a sane world, this would have been the end of the matter. Trump was impeached, but acquitted on a technicality, and should have been politically exiled in disgrace. But a party that had spent four years in fear of Trump couldn’t stand up to him and chart a new path. Instead, they coddled him, even while State parties began to punish and purge those who told the truth about the 2020 elections.
The media pressed Cheney on Trump’s continuing lies about the election and the efforts to minimize the events of January 6th. She could have obfuscated, dodged, and weaved as so many of her Republican colleagues did. She did not. She understood that the issues at the heart of January 6th were at the heart of our Republic that President Trump has shown his disloyalty and manifest unfitness to hold office. She was clear that she could never vote for Trump again.
She stated the truth, the truth that McCarthy and most of the caucus knew and many had in fact embraced in the aftermath of January 6th, and even though she was only responding to the lies of Trump and his supporters. Craven Congressmen Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) demanded that she be quiet and not respond to the liars who were undermining the Republic. A second vote was held in May, and the Conference voted to remove her. Emblematic of the moral cowardice of the GOP conference, the vote was done by “voice vote” so that no one could know who voted for or against Cheney.
She could have stayed Conference Chair, but Liz Cheney chose to be a leader rather than holding a title that indicated she was. It’s a striking choice because so many people like McCarthy, and the woman who replaced her-Rep. Elsie Stefanik (R-NY) wants power and positions as ends in themselves. Liz Cheney came to Washington to lead and is determined to fulfill her oath of office.
Tough choices continued. The House passed a bill to create a bi-partisan January 6th Commission modeled on the Commission to investigate the events of September 11, 2001, but Senate Republicans killed it for partisan reasons. Rep. John Katko (R-NY), who had negotiated the commission bill warned that if the bi-partisan commission was not approved, there would be an investigation and under far less favorable terms to Republicans and with far less credibility.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) proposed a special committee to investigate the events of January 6th, and most Republicans, including the vast majority of those who voted for the Commission, balked. Liz Cheney and Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) were the only ones to vote for it.
It should be acknowledged that there was a case to vote against the committee The rules were very partisan, giving Pelosi the unprecedented right to reject Republican appointees to the committee by the Minority Leader. In addition, fears that Pelosi’s picks would appoint partisan hacks such as Rep. Adam Schiff (R-CA), whose over-the-top assertions on Russian involvement in the 2016 election helped Trump parlay the very serious allegations uncovered by the Mueller probe as no big deal. Perhaps, it would be better to let the Justice Department do its thing rather than let a bunch of partisan grandstanders have at it.
Cheney saw things differently. She not only voted for the committee, but she also agreed to serve as its vice-chair. The bill’s provision allowing Pelosi to reject members appointed by Minority Leader McCarthy proved necessary as McCarthy appointed two memberswho should be testifying and investigated as potential accomplices, not serving on the investigating committee.
Cheney has shown a willingness to work with Democrats and expose the truth. She has brought a level of dignity and seriousness to the proceedings that is continuing to unnerve Republican leaders who are dedicated to defending Trump and covering up the myriad connections, lies, and clumsy conspiracies that led to Trump’s attempt to overturn the election.
Cheney has also taken a firm stand against the conferences’ more unhinged members such as Rep. Majorie Taylor-Greene (R-GA) and Paul Gosar (R-AZ). She has hit hard against laughable extremists like Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fl.)
At the same time, Cheney has exasperated progressives. The Twittersphere is full of people angry at the lionization of Liz Cheney by the media and mainstream Democrats because she’s still very much not a progressive. In the most narrow progressive minds, no one who opposes their agenda is capable of possessing laudable virtues.
She’s still fighting the Biden agenda and is as fierce a critic of the Administration as you’ll find. She’s still standing up for Wyoming’s resource industry. She has not changed one iota on any policy.
She doesn’t oppose election lies or support uncovering the truth about the January 6th riot because she’s abandoned her conservatism. Rather, her support for our constitutional system of government is at the core of her conservatism. The way that Trump and his ilk are leading the Party is that way of anarchy and madness. Cheney refuses to go along with it or remain silent.
And she’s paid a price. Friends have betrayed her. Her own state party has disowned her. And now a group of “conservative leaders” have called for the ousting of her from the House Republican Conference along with Rep. Kinzinger.
Given her absolute steadfast support for conservative values and agreement with these leaders on nearly every important issue, their efforts expose the true nature of the National Republican Party in 2021. It is a toxic mix of a dysfunctional family, a cult of personality, and a criminal enterprise to cover up the crimes of Donald Trump and his associates.
I personally wish that Congresswoman Cheney would leave this corrupt Party. I think she should seek re-election as an Independent. She might find, as Joe Lieberman did when he left the Democrats to run as an Independent in 2006, that the people of her state who are not partisan activists appreciate honesty, integrity, and competence, and will choose a person they can trust rather than a party label.
However, she seems determined to place the decision before the Wyoming GOP. Unlike past Trump intra-party critics, she’s not backing off or backing away. If Wyoming Republicans want to reject integrity and character and a record for fighting for what they say they value, she’s going to make them do it.
Heath Mayo (whom people like to crticize on Twitter) was criticized on Twitter for his expressed support for Congresswoman Cheney should she run for President:
The only thing wrong with Mayo’s tweet is that he used “literally” when he was being hyperbolic, but that is sadly normal. To be excited about someone as a potential preisdential candidate who has demonstrated great character and integrity is normal. What’s not normal is the number of people who have sworn fealty to a man with no character who betrayed his Oath to the Constitution and cost his party the House and the Senate.
I’m not nearly as excited about a Cheney-Trump presidential battle as Mister Mayor. She’s indicated she won’t run and as I’ve written before, the deck is stacked in Trump’s favor. If he wants to be the 2024 presidential nominee, he will be. I’m open to a wide variety of potential independent candidates in 2024, including Cheney.
Still, I would like to go and see Liz Cheney campaign before the August Republican primary. I live in a neighboring state and would like to see her, thank her for her service, and enjoy seeing a real live Republican with integrity before the breed goes extinct forever after the 2022 midterms.
2021 was a year that revealed character, particularly on the Right, the results were bitterly disappointing. However, the bright shining light was Liz Cheney. She revealed herself as a moral giant in a party full of cowardly lilliputians. The Trumpist right doesn’t understand her because it lacks understanding of what character and integrity are. They’ve so separated themselves from concepts that they once held sacrosanct.
Cheney is willing to stand with few or even alone when it comes down to it. She remains a true conservative, a true leader, and my conservative of the year.
Runner Up and Other Considerations
Liz Cheney was consistently supported by Kinzinger (R-Ill) who also has been unabashed in telling the truth of what happened on January 6th. His stance has led to harsh, cruel treatment by his own family.
Cheney was given the nod over Kinzinger because she began the year in House leadership and is the daughter of the a Republican former Vice-President, while Kinzinger was back-bencher. Her decisions and stances were more impactful.
In addition to that, Kinzinger had some votes beyond the entire issue of Trumpism and extremism that conservatives could reasonably take issue with it including his support for the President’s infrastructure bill and being the only Republican in either House to vote to raise the debt ceiling.
While Kinzinger would still fit well within the mainstream of a healthy American Center Right, Cheney’s more unvarnished record exposes the corruption of her critics. At least with Kinzinger, the same people who turned a blind eye to Trump running up near-Trillion dollar deficit in years when the economy was strong can cry some crocodile tears about fiscal responsibility.
The other eight members who voted for Impeachment in the House and the seven senators who did likewise did nothing to distinguish themselves in a way that would surpass Cheney.
Of course, it might be declared that I’m Trump-obsessed and am ignoring conservative accomplishments outside that issue. To that, I would ask, What accomplishments?
COVID kookiness?
While I oppose \the President’s vaccine mandate on private business and believe there are some legitimate excess in progressive COVID policies, much of the political efforts on COVID from the far right have been anything but conservative. We’ve seen efforts to interfere with private businesses’ decisions to mandate vaccines among their employees or as a condition of receiving a service. This is just as big an example of nanny statism as the California Democratic efforts to turn In-n-Out Burgers into the vaccine police.
In addition, Republicans have coddled and even amplified unhinged anti-vaccine nonsense. There was no accomplishment. In fact, the propaganda spread by Tucker Carlson, Newsmax, and others led to pointless death. The American far-right seemed determined to enter a race with Planned Parenthood to see who could kill the most Americans. While Planned Parenthood still won, far-right anti-vax propagandists made a go of it.
On critical race theory, many on the right successfully identified the problem with teaching young children to view themselves as either oppressors or victims, but many of the bills to fight these excesses are overbroad and already creating consequences that will lead to a backlash against the anti-woke movement.
And on many other issues including the extremes of the transgenderism movement and the Biden administration failures at border, people on the right are great at pointing out problems but are doing very poorly in offering wise, well-thought-out, and well-considered solutions. Owning the libs is a bigger priority.
Watching Joe Biden fail and/or Joe Machin stopping Joe Biden are in no way “accomplishments” or “victories.” There is no hero who deserves decorated on the Right for the Democrats many self-destructive actions and policies.
I suppose you could give Governor-election Glenn Youngkin (R-VA) credit for his campaign for Governor, but I’m not certain I’d describe him as a philosophical conservative. In addition, his campaign was simply clever. e managed to position himself in a way that both avoided offending Trumpists and the larger Virginia electorate. Being clever and splitting the difference doesn’t seem that commendable, isn’t transferrable other raises, and doesn’t merit “conservative of the year.”
Projecting Much, Ms. Ingraham?
This past week Laura Ingraham responded to the release of texts by Cheney that showed she and other Fox hosts were panicked and calling for Trump to call off the rioters on January 6th, and painted a very different picture of events than Ingraham has told her audience.
She assailed Congresswoman Cheney and Congressman Kitzinger and suggested they were doing all this to get cushy jobs on MSNBC (where Ingraham began her television career.) And to me it illustrates how not only don’t people who lack integrity not understand what integrity is, they assign their own base motives to people of integrity.
Laura Ingraham would be done on Fox and done on the radio if she dared to tell the truth about Donald Trump and January 6th. She has to find some way to discredit what she privately told Mister Meadows. Ms. Ingraham is far more desperate to stay on Cable new than Cheney or Kinzinger ever could be. Whatever, their post-Congressional plans, I think both will have better career options than working with Chris Hayes and Joy Reid every day. Ms. Ingraham, on the other hand, has no career if the the crazy web of lies she’s helped to build is broken.
Note:
I will be taking the next two weeks off. See you in 2022.
*Schiff’s obnoxious behavior in the first Trump Impeachment trial made it far easier for Senators who hated Trump to vote to acquit him
Note: An earlier version of this piece that was sent out by email included a section criticizing Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council. While everything in that section was accurate, on reflection, I felt it was a bit nasty and honestly a bit of a stretch to make a point, so I removed it.