As a 40+ year veteran of the Congress arena and GOP politics, I have been cheering for US Rep. Liz Cheney’s success. At least until the past week.
The daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, she impressed early and easily as a freshman House member first elected not even 5 years ago. She launched her political career inauspiciously, a false start in 2014, challenging then-US Sen. Mike Enzi (R-WY) in the GOP primary before withdrawing over family health issues.
Having moved her family to Wyoming in 2012, she won in 2016 the same US House seat held by her father during the 1980s. Like her father, Liz rose quickly in leadership to chair the House Republican Conference, right after her first term, the 3rd highest leadership position currently behind Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) and whip Steve Scalise (R-LA). That is heady stuff; a meteoric rise to leadership.
She has always been serious and smart, just like her father, also having served during the Bush 43 era State Department as a Deputy Assistant Secretary for Near Eastern Affairs.
She was already being penciled in as a future Speaker of the House. That impression was cemented when she declined to run for Enzi’s open US Senate seat in 2020, which she would have easily won.
That was then. This is now. She will be deposed and likely replaced by Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), very much equal to Cheney’s estimability. More about Elise later. While there may be others looking to replace Cheney, Stefanik seems to have taken the pole position with an early endorsement from the popular and powerful House Whip Scalise. And this position has evolved into a leadership job for a woman, especially given that males occupy the top two slots. Fortunately, the House GOP is blessed with a strong bench of strong, talented, and conservative women.
It didn’t have to be this way, but there’s no going back now. Sure, Cheney voted to impeach Trump, one of 10 Republicans to do so. Okay, that’s one thing. She blamed Trump for the January 6th Capitol violence, an event that clearly shook up much of Congress and led to a rushed, flawed, and failed impeachment process. She wasn’t alone, and Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell and others largely agreed with her.
McCarthy and other leaders came to her rescue and spent a lot of political capital when she was challenged for her leadership post after that vote. She won handily, 140-65. McCarthy wisely was trying to unify his caucus and signal that there was room for diverse points of view, even over Trump. The smart play would have been for Cheney to segue away from her animosity towards Trump and focus on the party’s policy agenda, at least in opposition to the Biden-Harris Administration’s hard-left tilt. There was certainly plenty of ammunition to work with, especially on foreign policy. After all, as Conference Chair, she was the point person on external messaging.
She was in an ideal position to support McCarthy and help heal the divide between pro-Trump and anti-Trump Republicans by focusing on their real opponents, congressional Democrats, and their deeply progressive agenda.
Instead, she continued to double down on Trump and his post-election election claims of fraud, pouring salt into the party’s post-election wounds. The opportunity was there to build and articulate a cohesive, united, and constructive agenda and strong critique of Biden-Harris policies. It still is. But Byron York of the Washington Examiner says it best: “Cheney's problem is not that she voted to impeach Trump. It is that she can't move on from voting to impeach Trump.” Bingo.
This has nothing to do with Cheney being a liberal (she’s not) or being a RINO (she isn’t). Nor is it really about her being a “warmonger.” And despite media reports, it has less to do with Trump than is being portrayed. Those are sideshows. She undermined McCarthy and distracted, destructively, from the leadership’s agenda and messaging. From The Hill:
“It’s at a boiling point. This isn’t about Liz Cheney wanting to impeach Donald Trump; this isn’t about Donald Trump at all. It’s about Liz Cheney being completely out of synch with the majority of our conference,” said one GOP lawmaker, who said Cheney’s antics this week were the focus of a flurry of text messages with House colleagues.
“As we're focused on unifying the Republican conference and our mission to win back the majority, she is focused on the past and proving a point,” the lawmaker told The Hill. “She is alienating herself from the conference, and I have to imagine if she doesn't resign there will be a new vote in the near future and the result will be lopsided in the opposite direction of what it was before."
“She may go down in a second vote,” added a second GOP lawmaker, who had voted in February to keep Cheney in her leadership post.
On Saturday, Rep. Lance Gooden (R-Texas) tweeted that Cheney would be out by the end of May: "Liz Cheney has promised she will campaign on impeaching Trump 'every day of the week.' Good luck with that, Liz!”
So, she will be gone as Conference Chair on May 12th. Elise Stefanik, 36, who won high praise for helping recruit and elect 17 new GOP Congresswomen in the 2020 elections, appears poised to move into the position. Like Liz, she is smart, tenacious, articulate, and talented. Unlike Liz, she is a team player and focused on unifying her caucus and party. Elise also will likely win reelection in her large, rural upstate New York district (decennial redistricting notwithstanding) while Liz is not well-positioned in very pro-Trump Wyoming. Elise not only has great political instincts but terrific policy chops as well.
And she’s no partisan bomb-thrower. She ranks13th in the US House for her bipartisanship, according to The Lugar Center. Liz Cheney? She ranks 421 out of 435 on the same index. Elise has the uncanny knack for being highly respectful and supportive of her GOP colleagues while working with Democrats on key issues. Interestingly, Elise worked at the Bush-Cheney White House on the Domestic Policy Staff, and with the Office of Chief of Staff.
Still, her political career has had an interesting trajectory, from being seen as a center-right, even “moderate” Republican to a strong defender of President Trump. Ironically, Cheney's voting record suggests she is more loyal to Trump’s policies than has Stefanik.
Where did Liz go wrong? It looks like a variant of Trump derangement syndrome, a debilitating, even emotional condition that clouds political judgment as the worst caricatures of the former President roam around rent-free in one’s head. She may have had it under control leading up to the awful events of January 6th. Then it broke out. That, or she’s finding an interesting way of segueing to a new career as a CNN or MSNBC analyst.
You don’t have to like Donald Trump. You can blame him for what happened on January 6th at the US Capitol. You can even vote to impeach him over it. Many don’t, many do, and many did. But you also have to remain rooted in reality. An effective congressional party leader grasps the political reality of the conference and the responsibility to repair and unify the party. After all, the House GOP looks poised to regain control after the 2022 election. All she had to do was move on from her animosity towards Trump, no matter what he does, and face “front toward enemy.” Instead, she seems to be turning her Claymore mines inside the tent she’s supposed to be serving. And Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is happy to help her.
Internecine warfare is never good for your team or party. It is distracting and destructive. But just like the struggling political campaign suffering under failing leadership, a change in campaign managers, while disruptive, is needed. It is time to let Liz go and move on, even if she embraces an antagonist role with her own ranks. It will be a lonely existence.
Given her own policy chops, perhaps she could segue from the leadership track to a policy track, given her important committee assignments. It might even help her get reelected, as bleak as that looks right now. She does have multiple primary opponents, which increases her odds of surviving a primary. But I suspect she’s eyeballing the political exit ramp.
Cheney could have moved up to House GOP Whip, and beyond. Not gonna happen. It looks like Elise’s party now.