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“House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said Tuesday he's ‘lost confidence’ in Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) during a moment of candor caught on a hot mic, a tape reviewed by Axios shows.” Axios
“[Former President Donald] Trump this week lashed out at Cheney in a statement after she said, without naming him, that anyone who claimed the 2020 election had been stolen was ‘poisoning our democratic system.’” Reuters
The right is divided about whether Cheney should be removed from her leadership position.
“Liz Cheney is not on the verge of being forced out of leadership because she has convictions. There are plenty of GOP House members who 1) don’t like Trump and 2) have varying views on things like amnesty and foreign policy (Cheney is out of step with most Republicans on those two issues). Those members are not being pushed out of the party or punished…
“The reason Cheney is in trouble is that she’s refusing to let go of her anti-Trumpism and January 6th obsession when those things are simply not relevant to the party anymore. She’s also been directly undermining McCarthy publicly after he went out of his way to give her space to vent. She’s had that space and now is the time to let it go and move forward. Cheney doesn’t have the capacity or will to do that. Thus, she has no place in leadership…
“Republicans need leaders that aren’t going to go on Chuck Todd’s or Jake Tapper’s show and cut the knees out from under their own caucus.”
Bonchie, RedState
“Republicans need Donald Trump to help the party take back the House in 2022. For Cheney to go off script and make suggestions totally at odds with the reality of being a Republican politician in this day and age is not helping or being ‘productive’ as McCarthy says. If Cheney was some backbench nobody, she could probably get away with it. But as a member of the party leadership, she has some responsibility to foster unity in the party…
“That said, forming a circular firing squad to deal with her contrariness isn’t helpful either. Republicans cannot afford to be a monochromatic party of one shade of conservatism. Litmus tests are self-defeating. Running someone out of town who disagrees with the majority is not the way to build a winning coalition.”
Rick Moran, PJ Media
Others note that “Cheney has attacked President Biden’s decision [to leave Afghanistan], calling it a huge propaganda victory for the Taliban and al-Qaeda. That would have been a near-unanimous opinion among Republicans as recently as 2015, when Islamist terrorism seemed to be the nation’s serious foreign threat. But that is no longer the case. Most Republicans now rightly see China as a more dangerous foe, and many are willing to cede Afghanistan to a minor set of foes to concentrate our efforts on the bigger threat. Cheney’s mind-set seems to be stuck back in 2003…
“She [also] recently criticized a memo from the head of the House Republican Study Committee, Indiana Rep. Jim Banks, who said the GOP should cement itself as a ‘Working-Class Party.’ The memo advocated some pretty mild ideas, such as limiting illegal immigration and maintaining trade restrictions on China as ways to increase jobs and wages for working-class Americans. Cheney, however, reportedly described it as neo-Marxist during a Congressional Institute call… This is an example of George W. Bush-era globalism — precisely the views that majorities of Republicans now reject. How can she lead a party whose views she largely disagrees with?”
Henry Olsen, Washington Post
Supporters of Cheney argue that “Even as President Biden proposes the largest expansion of government in decades, Mr. Trump is spending his energy settling scores in his own party… Republicans will look foolish, or worse, to swing voters if they refight 2020 in 2022. They can truthfully say that Democrats used lawsuits to exploit the pandemic to change the election rules in some states. They can also say Democratic judges on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court let Democrats get away with it. Democrats did a better job of exploiting the pandemic election rules than did the GOP…
“But there’s no evidence any of this was decisive, as Mr. Trump lost the popular vote in a rout and the Electoral College by a similar margin to what he won in 2016. Mr. Trump lost even as Republicans gained 12 seats in the House… Republicans should find a way to speak this truth to voters in 2022—and quickly turn to running on an agenda for the future that will check Mr. Biden and his cradle-to-grave entitlement state. Purging Liz Cheney for honesty would diminish the party.”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
The left is critical of attempts to remove Cheney and condemns the Republican party’s unsubstantiated claims of electoral fraud.
The left is critical of attempts to remove Cheney and condemns the Republican party’s unsubstantiated claims of electoral fraud.
“Cheney’s crime is that, unlike almost every other prominent Republican not named Mitt Romney, she hasn’t budged from the posture she adopted January 6. Rather than accept the facts on the ground — namely, that the party’s base overwhelmingly believes Trump’s lie that Joe Biden stole the election — Cheney has continued to affirm the legitimacy of Biden’s win and denounce Trump’s coup…
“What’s astonishing about Cheney’s dissent is not only that she is such an unlikely figure to mount a doomed and lonely stand. She was born to the party and the conservative movement; she hasn’t got a moderate bone in her body. What’s more unusual still is that she has no obvious rationale other than sheer principle. Elected officials, faced with an unwinnable fight, nearly always yield to realism. Cheney apparently believes that respect for the rule of law is a nonnegotiable principle of conservatism.”
Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine
“A CNN poll released last Friday found that roughly one-third of Americans, and 70 percent of all Republicans, think President Joe Biden was not the legitimate winner of the 2020 presidential election. There is no evidence to support that position, of course, but that hasn’t stopped former President Donald Trump and most other Republican officials from either spreading lies…
“If the United States had a slightly different political system, Cheney, Romney, and other apostates from the Trumpian faith could form a new political party that better represents their values. Alas, forming a viable third party is all but impossible in national politics thanks to the first-past-the-post electoral system and the immense infrastructure of the existing parties. It’s one reason why the occasional suggestions that Trump might break away from the GOP and form a ‘MAGA Party’ of his own are so unlikely. That, and his grip on the Republican Party is so strong that there would be no point.”
Matt Ford, New Republic
“Congressional Republicans have long walked a tightrope on Trump’s false claims of fraud in the 2020 election. They’ve supported various efforts to question and even overturn the result, but few of them went nearly as far as Trump. He talked about massive fraud and dead people voting, and made baseless claims about voting machines; they talked more broadly about supposed ‘irregularities’ and states allegedly not following their own election laws. It’s clear that most of them knew what Trump was saying was bunk, so they watered it down in the name of at least appearing as though they were on his side. Even Trump’s impeachment lawyers did this…
“The GOP’s watered-down argument about the validity of the election results, although not totally echoing Trump, has led a strong majority of Republicans to falsely believe that the election was indeed stolen. That’s a pretty big deal. It’s harmful to democracy for people to falsely believe such things. But to [Indiana Rep. Jim] Banks and others, it’s neither here nor there; Cheney needs to be on the team and stop dwelling on whether the team may have very recently participated in undermining our system of government, because there are future elections to win…
“The episode only reinforces just how much the goal is power, rather than accountability, democracy and self-reflection.”
Aaron Blake, Washington Post
“There is simply nothing more dangerous for a two-party democracy than to have one party declare that no election where it loses is legitimate, and, therefore, if it loses it will just lie about the results and change the rules. That’s exactly what’s playing out now…
“What I learned covering the struggle for the future of the Arab-Muslim world post-9/11 is that the war of ideas inside is everything. Sure, it is important for outsiders to condemn bad behavior, but their voices have limited impact. Real change happens only when the war of ideas is won by insiders, working from the roots upward… Unless more principled Republicans stand up for the truth about our last election, we’re going to see exactly how a democracy dies.”
Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times
“The current fuss over Cheney tells us less about her political ‘growth’ or ‘change’ or ‘courage’ than it does about the press corps’ need for a changing story and the need for politicians to differentiate themselves. Political ambition can be consummated in a number of ways. One can support the leadership and wait to be called on, which is a pretty dull story. Or one can oppose the bosses and attempt to topple them, a story that writes itself and attracts readers…
“The impeachment saga presented her with not so much a test of courage but a fork in her career. Go down with Trump or ride his political corpse to glory? Some time ago she decided to saddle the old bull. While Trump might be bucking more than Cheney anticipated, the wild ride is burnishing her image the way John McCain’s defiance of Trump did his. The field is overstocked with Trump clones—Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, Ron DeSantis, Kristi Noem, Mike Pompeo, Nikki Haley, Tom Cotton, et al. Having studied politics for decades under her mother and father, Cheney has surely gamed this out. You can call her courageous all you want and express your astonishment at her opposition to Trump. But there is more calculation on display here than there is valor.”
Jack Shafer, Politico
