My Thoughts on Liz Cheney's Defeat

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY)

On Tuesday, Rep. Liz Cheney lost the Republican Primary in Wyoming to Trump-endorsed attorney Harriet Hageman in Wyoming.  This was not unexpected.  In fact, if anything, Cheney was a massive underdog despite being a thrice-elected incumbent who has one of the most famous last names in modern Republican politics.  Cheney's tenure in the House was brief-she only served for three terms in the House, a drop in a bucket where you can serve for 30+ years and have little more than asterisk next to your name in the history books.  Yet despite an ignoble start to her congressional career, Cheney is the sort of figure who will be remembered with high regard by historians, and by those who saw why she lost, and is one of several figures this year that tried to save one of America's two major political parties from itself, only to go down in battle, possibly the last battle for the soul of the Republican Party.

If you'd told me 8 years ago I'd be writing wistfully about Liz Cheney, you'd have gotten an eyeroll.  Cheney's first run for high office was hardly a profile in courage.  She decided to primary Sen. Mike Enzi, in some ways a mirror of what would bring down her colleague Rep. Joe Kennedy III in 2020, using her famous name and relative youth to take on a seasoned, though not as famous, incumbent.  Cheney, though, attracted really ugly headlines for coming out full force against gay marriage that year, despite her sister being one of the most famous openly-queer people in the GOP; her father, even, was openly pro-gay marriage as a result of his daughter Mary being in a relationship with a woman.  Both sisters publicly feuded about it, and it was a disingenuous start to Cheney's career.  Two years later, she won the open House seat after the retirement of (now-Senator) Cynthia Lummis, and quickly rocketed up the House leadership ranks, becoming House Conference Chair in 2018 and looking like she'd be the first Republican House Speaker at some point.

But Cheney met a force she couldn't get behind in 2016 when Donald Trump was elected to office.  Cheney was not, exactly, someone who was adamantly against Trump-ism.  She voted for him in 2016 and 2020.  She didn't vote to impeach during his first impeachment trial over Ukraine, and voted with the former president 93% of the time.  Cheney, as is oftentimes forgotten in modern public parlance, is one of the most conservative members of the Republican Party, her occasional stray votes supporting the left on gay marriage & contraceptives (she eventually reversed her stance on gay marriage, and said it was something she regretted from her 2014 campaign) notwithstanding.  

But Cheney could not stand what happened in the wake of the November 2020 elections.  To Cheney, it seemed quite simple-Joe Biden, a candidate she had not supported, had received more votes than Donald Trump, and therefore the American people had chosen him as their president.  The daughter of a man who entered elected office before she was a teenager, she knew how elections worked-the winner wins, the loser concedes, and you respect whom the people chose.  Donald Trump's behavior was the antithesis of her democracy-first stance, it ran against the American exceptionalism that her father had made central (for the good and frequently for the bad) to his two terms as Vice President.  On January 6th, Cheney urged her colleagues not to back Trump's conspiracy theories and lies about the election, that certifying Joe Biden as the victor of the election wasn't a vote for Biden, but a vote for the rule of law.  Outside of the Capitol building, President Trump was urging a violent mob "we've got to get rid of...the Liz Cheneys of the world," a direct attack on the congresswoman.

January 6th changed the course of Liz Cheney's life and career.  After she voted to impeach Donald Trump for his involvement with the terrorist attacks of that day, she was removed as House Conference Chair.  It became pretty clear that she had no path to reelection in ruby-red Wyoming, and so Cheney instead chose to campaign not to her constituents but to history.  She gave the January 6th Committee a Republican member and thus bipartisan credentials.  She has launched a series of public hearings that will make it considerably more difficult for Donald Trump to ever hold public office in the United States again.  Indeed, it's increasingly probable that he will face jail-time in some capacity, either related to January 6th or the rest of his behavior while in office.

Cheney is not the only Republican who voted to impeach Trump who has paid a price.  Like Cheney, Peter Meijer, Jaime Herrera Beutler, and Tom Rice all lost their respective primaries.  Richard Burr, Pat Toomey, John Katko, Fred Upton, Anthony Gonzalez, and Adam Kinzinger all chose to retire rather than face likely defeat.  Only Lisa Murkowski, David Valadao, & Dan Newhouse advanced to the general while voting to impeach Donald Trump, and it's worth noting all three did so through all-party primaries (Valadao could lose to a Democrat in November, making the count even smaller).  The price of taking on Donald Trump was very steep, and almost every Republican who has done it in the past six years has paid the price.

But it has to be said, Cheney stands apart as perhaps the last Republican with a backbone.  She is an unconventional figure to put the title of "hero" on, and I'm not going to; her views on torture, in particular, are no progressive's idea of admirable.  But when her country called on her to sacrifice her power & position in order to make a stand for democracy, she did.  And she refused to just back down & not run what she knew was a losing race-she wanted the whole nation to watch as the Republicans rejected her solely for her lack of fealty to Donald Trump.  It is clear that in today's Republican Party, there is no room for someone who stands against the authoritarian attitudes of Donald Trump, and that the only avenue forward is through the Democrats.  Cheney is the last major Republican who truly felt like democracy was more important than beating the Democrats.  That might not have been the idea that Liz Cheney was hoping to espouse when she first ran for Congress eight years ago, but it was a message that will forever be emblazoned on her.