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It’s Time for Liz Cheney to Go
House Republicans kept Liz Cheney in her leadership role by a secret vote in February. If there’s a vote in May, she won’t be so lucky.
The Wyoming representative angered many in the base when she joined nine other Republicans to impeach President Donald Trump for his role in the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol. As House Republican Conference chair, she holds the third-highest position in minority leadership. Trump supporters found it a betrayal of their party.
Cheney avoided removal with a 145-61 vote in her favor. Anyone with a hint of political acumen or leadership instincts would start mending fences, uniting the caucus, and moving forward. Cheney chose the opposite.
She crowed about her victory at the time and worsened her position ever since. Every few weeks, Cheney popped up in the news, always to condemn Donald Trump and the majority of Republicans who supported him.
The last straw came Monday. Speaking at an off-the-record AEI conference in Sea Island, GA, Cheney said: “We can’t embrace the notion the election is stolen. It’s a poison in the bloodstream of our democracy. We can’t whitewash what happened on January 6 or perpetuate Trump’s big lie. It is a threat to democracy. What he did on January 6 is a line that cannot be crossed.”
These comments were leaked, as Cheney expected. They were preceded earlier in the day with her tweet: “The 2020 presidential election was not stolen. Anyone who claims it was is spreading THE BIG LIE, turning their back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system.”
As after every Cheney comment in the past three months, Republicans and pundits are attacking each other, relitigating the 2016 and 2020 elections, and fretting about Trump’s future moves.
If House leadership’s job is to divide its own party, Cheney would be a perfect fit. But Republican Conference Chairs are supposed to unite the team and take the fight to Democrats. You know, the party that controls the House, the Senate, and the White House, and is jamming through a radical progressive agenda.
On substance, I agree with Cheney. The election was not stolen and Trump’s Jan. 6 incitement merited impeachment. But all that is history. The GOP’s job today is to stop Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Chuck Schumer. In that fight — the only fight that matters six months after the election — Cheney is AWOL.
Say I bought a sweet 1967 Ford Mustang. Candy apple red, 320 horses, lovingly restored. But six months ago, my wife borrowed it, ran a stop sign, and totaled the car. I would be upset. We would have a long, painful talk. I would sulk for a few weeks then buy a boring used Honda to replace it.
Then my wife asks me to drop off the kids at school, I reply, “Oh, should I bring them in my crappy Accord I had to buy because you destroyed my beautiful Mustang?!“
When she asks if I want anything from Starbucks, I say, “how about a hot Venti Ford-uccino? Do they have one of those?“
“Ugh, Jon. the stylist wrecked my hair.”
“Speaking of wrecks…”
“Jon, that was six months ago. Can we please move on?”
“We can’t embrace the notion that you didn’t wreck my car. It’s a poison in the bloodstream of our marriage. We can’t whitewash what happened to my Mustang! What you did to my car was a line that cannot be crossed!”
Everything sulky Jon said above was accurate. Nothing was helpful, intelligent, or useful to our relationship.
The wife would be right to file for divorce. And it’s time to file papers on Rep. Cheney.
This mess isn’t just about Liz Cheney, the House GOP, or Beltway pundits. Cheney was hired to represent the people of Wyoming and she refuses to do it.
In a just-released poll, Wyoming Republican primary voters oppose her 29% to 65%. Fifty-two percent would vote against her regardless of the challenger. This is hardly surprising since the state chose Trump over Biden 70.4% to 26.7%. Trump’s margin was higher than Cheney’s in 2020.
It’s not as if she is bitterly holding on in a blue state. Wyoming’s lower house is 51-9 GOP and the senate is 28-2 GOP. You could paint an R on a stray cat and voters would send it to the US Capitol over a Democrat.
Most GOP representatives would do a better job as Chair today and Cheney will likely be removed from the House by her own constituents 18 months from now. The job should go to a Republican who wants to achieve party goals in the current Congress and prepare to take the majority in 2022.
For those who want to relitigate the past, there are plenty of pundits eager to take up the slack.
Published in Politics
Again, I blame Trump’s primary voters. They forced Trump on the party. Practically the first words out of his mouth were praise for the socialized medical systems of a couple of other countries. That SHOULD have cost him. It didn’t because his supporters DIDN’T CARE about the issue. Instead Trumpworld blames Ryan. Cowards.
On the other hand, do you have any evidence that any of the other candidates would have DONE anything in those areas? Not just TALK, as they and others like them have done for decades. But actually DO.
Meanwhile, Trump actually DID many OTHER things that those others, and others like them, had also only TALKED about, for decades.
In practical terms, Trump wasn’t perfect, but he was still way better than those other mooks.
Absolute nonsense. There is not a shred of truth to your claim. Scott Walker did a LOT. Look at his record. There’s your evidence. I don’t support everything Walker did but he did have a big impact for the better on his state. He was under almost constant fire and still made huge strides in advancing conservatism in Wisconsin.
I didn’t support Jeb but his governorship of Florida was also very consequential. Jim freaking Gilmore would have been better than Trump.
You have a bad memory. Ryan passed the tax cut. He got the skinny repeal of Obamacare passed in the House. He proposed the border adjustment tax which would have funded the wall. Trump torpedoed that idea which is okay but he didn’t give an alternative. Later Trump ended up fighting Nancy and Chuck for the money. When they didn’t deliver, he used the Constitutionally dubious tactic of repurposing defense department funding.
You mean the Trump-created silliness. He was the one who was cozying up to Putin during the campaign. Nobody forced him to do that.
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a40607/donald-trump-putin/
The Obama admin and the Clinton campaign amped it up to 11 and were guilty of putting their own political interests ahead of the country’s. They invented the collusion narrative. They stepped way out of bounds nurturing this non-issue (well, mostly a non-issue) but it started with Trump.
Oh brother. The guy who never missed an opportunity to hurl an insult, found himself with few friends.
<Gomer Pyle voice>Surprise, surprise, surprise!</Gomer Pyle voice>
The real wonder is how gracious Dubya has been to Trump over the years. Trump accused Dubya of lying us into war and tried to get Dubya impeached. Nothing Dubya has said about Trump has come close to that level of nastiness.
I must have missed the Scott Walker presidency.
You asked about the other candidates. Apparently, you missed the premise of the question YOU asked.
My point was about other candidates being president. Past presidents came from other positions where they had “done a lot” but they seemed to wilt once in the oval office. I saw no reason to believe Walker would have done any better, and especially not JEB!
Nobody had any foresight or planning on getting rid of the ACA when total political control was dropped in their lap by the voters.
He survived a recall in Wisconsin. The idea that he would have wilted under pressure is fatuous. You supported the guy who was perfectly okay with socialized medicine and who took entitlement reform off the table from the very beginning. Trump didn’t wilt under pressure. He wilted before any pressure was applied.
They have to replace employer-based coverage with a type of universal coverage. This is both for political and operational reasons. It doesn’t have to be as socialist as you make it sound.
The time to do entitlement reform was 30 years ago.
I’m not making it sound like anything. Trump is the one who praised socialist solutions. I want more market-based approaches to the issue. Yes, entitlement reform should have been done yesterday. That doesn’t magically fix the problem today.
Trump had never thought it through, much less how to communicate it.
I’ll sketch out what I think they had to do. They had to wipe out employment-based insurance which makes people very very nervous and then they had to set up a system that was basically straight indemnity policies plus forcing everybody onto concierge care. Then you subsidize as necessary.
They had eight years to get ready for this moment. If you are going to say Trump was bad, they were worse. I have no idea why they didn’t stand down for a year if they weren’t ready.
The more I learn about the unfunded liabilities and all of the lies around Medicare and Social Security, it absolutely blows my mind.
Trump was the president. No, he didn’t think it through but that didn’t stop him from pretending he had a plan. You seem to think there was some way the GOP Congress could have pushed something through and then Trump would have been some kind of a puppet, meekly signing whatever Congress put in front of him. I say Trump was bad but he was the standard bearer for the party. And it matters when the voters give mixed signals. (It also matters when someone like McCain violates the promise he made to his voters.)
Yes, ending employer-based insurance makes people nervous. I prefer such a plan too but you need to explicitly communicate an idea like that when you are appealing to the voters. Nothing like that kind of plan was ever put before them.
This was one of my criticisms of Trump. He lacked all kinds of experience for this type of situation. They should have just stood down for a year and done some town halls.
Having said that, all of those people in Congress are terrible. They are terrible people. Eight freaking years.
Not nobody. Walker and Jindal had plans they released for consideration. Jeb Bush had a plan too. (I don’t remember what the other candidates proposed or didn’t propose.) The primary voters were not interested.
https://www.nationalreview.com/2015/08/scott-walker-health-care-plan-2016/
https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/10/13/jeb-bush-presents-obamacare-alternative
OK I scanned all of that. It’s important to remember that McCain was trying to wipe our employer-based insurance and everybody freaked out.
Since we have been mucking everything up since 1946, I think we don’t have any choice except to throw everybody in a gigantic actuarial pool and then subsidize it as necessary. That’s sort of what employer-based insurance is anyway, except it really screws over a lot of people, including with what is effectively regressive taxation.
It would take like a whole year of town halls, and I think probably not enough republican legislators are smart enough to handle it. The Democrats don’t care, of course. It’s so depressing.
I try to get people to listen to this podcast. One of the things on there is that corporations are effectively now the safety net. That’s why the Fed won’t back off. It’s destroying us.
https://investresolve.com/podcasts/mike-green-the-fourth-turning-and-reimagining-the-american-dream/
Yeah, that was during the 2008 campaign. I think it was something Phil Graham cobbled together for McCain. When McCain had the chance to vote for the skinny repeal he failed to keep his promise – shameful of him.
Rubio and Cruz had plans too.
https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2021/04/14/did-cheating-affect-the-results-of-the-2020-election-a-majority-of-voters-think-so-n1440003
Above 30% of dems think cheating impacted the election.
Below- Only 62% of voters are very confident in the fairness of the election. That includes only 28% of independents being very confident the elections were fair
https://news.northeastern.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/COVID19-CONSORTIUM-REPORT-29-ELECTION-DEC-2020.pdf
Let’s keep in mind too that Scott Walker lost re-election as governor to a Democrat, and if he had been the presidential nominee in 2016, I think he would have been among several at that time who would have lost to Hillary. Not because Hillary would have gotten more votes than she did anyway, but because he or the others would have received fewer than Trump did. Trump had/has problems, but he gets more people out to vote for him. And it’s possible he did last November too, but we were prevented from seeing it.
Not really. That election was blatantly stolen. Though I understand one gets investigated by the DOJ for saying so, . . . it’s so.
There’s just no way Evers was a better candidate than Burke and people were Scott Walkered-out after 4 elections in 8 years? He dropped 80k-ish votes from 2012 to 2014 and then gained some back in 2018 but by then opposition was certainly motivated. Not to mention the extra motivation Trump gave to D voters to drive turnout. Not every election you don’t like is stolen. There’s a lot of factors and Walker had more than most against his favor.
No. Evers wasn’t just a terrible candidate, he’s a terrible governor. Lucky for us he’s fearful and cringing in the face of the slightest pushback, so he never followed in the footsteps of Gretchen Whitmer this past year.
But when Walker’s ahead at midnight when the news is reporting that 100% of the precincts in Milwaukee had been counted (and almost the rest of the entire state), and then within the next hour 50,000 more ballots are “discovered” in Milwaukee, . . . yes, I declare this election stolen. And I’m right.
Dude, I know my state. I know how things are done here. Democrats lie, cheat, and steal all the time. Or pull garbage like the John Doe investigations to silence any conservative voices. We are the original “deep state.”
In 2004 Republican Dino Rossi ran against Democrat Christine Gregoire for governor of Washington. Rossi won the first count, but the numbers were close enough to trigger a recount — which he also won and was duly certified as the winner. Subsequent to that the Dems raised enough money to pay for a manual recount. She ended up winning the manual recount by, I think 129 votes, the bulk of which were miraculously discovered in a box as being uncounted and found in an older section of downtown Seattle frequented by drunks and homeless types. It was, to put it mildly, very disheartening and convinced me that ballot counting laws and voter ID laws in our country are seriously in need of reform.
If I recall correctly (not at all a given), the fire suppression sprinklers in the basement of the King County Courthouse accidently went off shortly after this recount and destroyed
all the evidencethe ballots stored there and prevented any further counting. (I wonder if this stunt is coming in AZ soon?)Man, they sure go to the “sprinkler system” excuse a lot, don’t they?
People in the know use halon in situations like that, but then they wouldn’t be able to “accidentally” destroy evidence when needed.