Wednesday’s ouster of Rep. Liz Cheney from a leadership position was the last chip of resistance to fall in the rebranding of the Republican Party.
Hesitant to go on record — this is history-making, after all — Republicans held a voice vote calling for Cheney’s removal as chair of the House Republican Conference because of her refusal to endorse what has become known as the “big lie,” former President Donald Trump’s insistence that the 2020 election was rigged against him.
Cheney also remains unrepentant in blaming Trump for his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the nation’s Capitol, something House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Sen. Mitch McConnell have since walked back.
With no one to push back, the Republican Party is now, officially, the Party of Trump, and those who dare say otherwise will suffer the same fate as Cheney.
The irony is that the conservative bona fides of the three-term Representative from Wyoming are ironclad. She’s a hawk when it comes to foreign policy, strongly supporting a continued U.S. military presence in Afghanistan. She’s against same-sex marriage, despite her younger sister, Mary, having a wife. She’s supported every tax cut. And, as the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, she was weaned on conservative politics, and has served various stints in the State Department.
CHENEY’S ouster, however, has nothing to do with values or public policy. Instead, the only litmus test for Republican politicians today is their fealty to a single individual.
Cheney took Wednesday’s vote on the chin and urged Republicans to not “let the former president drag us backward.”
Not the least of Cheney’s concerns is that by contending the 2020 Election was rigged, Trump is successfully undermining democracy. Right now, Republican-dominated legislatures are taking advantage of that lie by passing voter restriction laws and measures that bypass state election officials in favor of partisan politics.
A reported 70% of Republicans continue to believe the 2020 election was a fraud. To our knowledge, Trump is the only candidate among the thousands who ran on Nov. 3 to refuse to accept his race’s outcome. The Trump campaign filed 86 lawsuits in the wake of the election, of which nearly all were dropped or dismissed for lack of evidence.
REPUBLICANS defend Cheney’s rebuke by saying she isn’t being a team player. In fact, they say, she’s way off base to say Trump continues to foment doubt about the election outcome.
In a blatant black-is-white attempt, just hours after McCarthy called for the vote on Cheney, he said this on national TV: “I don’t think anybody is questioning the legitimacy of the presidential election. I think that is all over with.”
This is beyond wishful thinking. It’s an effort to whitewash history.
Just last week Trump posted, “… [T]his was a rigged election. Everybody knows it. People are watching in droves as Patriots work tirelessly to reveal the real facts of the most tainted and corrupt Election in American history.”
This is the very rhetoric that incited Trump supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
If Republicans won’t refute such lies, it’s on them to ensure more violence isn’t waiting in the wings.
