Liz Cheney and the responsibility of being right

Disbelieving The Big Lie is not enough

The one really good thing about the whole Liz Cheney situation is that we’re not the ones who have to decide what’s going to happen to her.  We didn’t have a vote when they cast her out of the House leadership last week, and we…or at least most of us…won’t be voting when she runs for reelection to her congressional seat next year in Wyoming. 

Being Liz Cheney is getting to be a rather lonely proposition these days.  A CBS poll released today shows that fully 80 percent of Republicans support her removal from her post in the House leadership.  Large majorities of them disagree with her position on the election of 2020 and feel that she’s not “on message” with her party.  Fully two thirds of Republicans feel that loyalty to Donald Trump is important, and a third of the party believes that disloyalty to Trump should be punished.

But today Cheney doubled down on “Fox News Sunday” and ABC’s “This Week.”  She said she regrets voting for Trump in last fall’s election, and said there was “no question” that another attack like the one on January 6 could happen again if Trump’s lies about the election “go unchecked.” 

 “I think it’s dangerous,” Cheney said. “I think that we have to recognize how quickly things can unravel. We have to recognize what it means for the nation to have a former president who has not conceded and who continues to suggest that our electoral system cannot function, cannot do the will of the people.”

She claimed that Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is “complicit” in the attack because of his support of Trump.  “We all have an obligation to stand up against that.”  She believes he should be called to testify before a bipartisan commission that will soon be put in charge of investigating the attack on the Capitol.  “He clearly has facts about that day, that an investigation into what happened, into the president’s actions, ought to get to the bottom of,” Cheney said. “And I think that he has important information that needs to be part of any investigation, whether it’s the FBI, the Department of Justice, or this commission.”

She criticized the ongoing campaign among Republicans to brush aside the attack as “a normal tourist visit.” “The notion that this was somehow a tourist event is disgraceful and despicable,” Cheney said. “And, you know, I won’t be part of whitewashing what happened on Jan. 6. Nobody should be part of it. And people ought to be held accountable.”

On one of the shows, Cheney would not expressly rule out running for president herself in 2024, saying her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, would like to see her run. 

It’s an odd feeling, watching a figure like Liz Cheney do this sudden about-face on Trump.  It’s a little bit like watching former Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele holding forth on the sins of the party on MSNBC, or former Republican “strategists” Steve Schmidt and Stuart Stevens railing against the “leader” of the Republican Party, or columnist Jennifer Rubin lighting into Trump on the op-ed page of the Washington Post.  We’re glad to have them on board, but don’t you wonder when one of them will stand up and take some responsibility for the dissolution of their party?

That’s what’s missing with Liz Cheney.  She’s right about Trump, but there’s a responsibility that comes with being right just as much as there is with being wrong.  I’m not talking about her vote against Joe Biden’s COVID relief plan.  She’s a conservative Republican.  She’s not going to suddenly decide it’s a good idea to help people in need or take care of the sick and elderly.  But she appears to be spending way more time looking forward at what she’s going to do next than she is looking backward at how her party got where it is today.  Republicans didn’t just wake up one morning and say, hey, look, it’s Trump!  It’s okay to be a racist loon now! 

Cheney’s party has been headed in this direction for a long time.  Way back when David Duke ran for the Louisiana state house as a Republican, and then ran as a Republican for the senate and for governor, people laughed him off.  But he pulled down a lot of votes.  So did Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond and countless other racist Republicans who got themselves elected over the years.  Everybody knew who they were and what they stood for.  It wasn’t like racism in the Republican Party was a secret.  It was the party’s reason for being in the Deep South, and then increasingly all over the country. 

It wasn’t a drooling racist who appointed John Roberts to the Supreme Court.  No, the man who appointed the supreme court justice who undid the Voting Rights Act and led to a wholesale attack by the Republican Party on voting rights was born at Grace New Haven Hospital while his father was a student at Yale, and would end up going to Yale himself, as well as Harvard Business School.  These guys like John Roberts and George W. Bush – and Josh Hawley and Ted Cruz, for that matter – weren’t driving pickup trucks and flying Confederate flags.  They were, and are, preppy sons of privilege and avatars of their party, the Republican Party, the same racist party that Liz Cheney was born into.

That she finds herself at such odds with her party today is an anomaly she has a responsibility to explore herself.  Unless and until she does, we should expect that if she runs for president in 2024, she’ll be running as a Trump Republican in all but name.