I keep waiting for Liz Cheney to flinch.
I keep looking for some sign that her nerve is faltering, that the attacks are getting to her and that the loneliness of her situation — unconditionally contemptuous of Donald Trump, emphatically committed to a Republican Party beyond him — has become unbearable.
But no. She’s all in and she’s all steel. It could well be the political death of her. Or it could give her a kind of immortality more meaningful than any office.
Cheney, who represents Wyoming in the House, is front and center this week, with a starring role as the vice chair of the House committee whose investigation into the Jan. 6 riot has reached a dramatic culmination in prime-time television hearings. She’s one of just two Republicans on the nine-member panel.
But while the other, Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, isn’t running for re-election, Cheney is in the middle of a furiously contested primary battle against a prominent Wyoming Republican official who has welded herself to Trump. Just two weeks ago, Trump traveled to the deep red state, which he won by more than 40 percentage points in 2020, to command his supporters to oust Cheney when they vote on Aug. 16. He said that she had “thrown in her lot with the radical left.”
That statement, like so much of his blather, was ludicrous. And it didn’t cow Cheney in the least.
In a subsequent interview with Robert Costa of CBS News, she called Republicans’ subservience to Trump “a cult of personality.” She said that the committee’s investigation had cemented her horror over the events of Jan. 6, which reflected a coordinated movement. “It’s extremely broad,” she said. “It’s extremely well organized. It’s really chilling.”
And when asked to analyze the obsequious comportment of the House Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, she said that it’s driven by “craven political calculation.” And she let him have it.
“He is embracing those in our party who are antisemitic,” she said. “He is embracing those in our party who are white nationalists. He is lying about what happened on Jan. 6. And he’s turned his back on the Constitution.” There wasn’t a wobble or a waver in those words. Not a lie, either.
That’s what makes Cheney so important. Whatever you think of her father, her past or the rest of her ideology, she has, for the past year and a half, been an unstinting, unflagging and — frankly — inspiring model of principle above partisanship, of truth over tribalism. While nearly all the other Republicans in Congress keep changing their tunes to harmonize with Trump, she refuses to sing along.
It’s certainly possible that she relishes all the attention — and, from some quarters, applause — that her rebellion attracts. There may be moral vanity in the mix of her motives. And she’s no doubt playing a long game, with its own wager: that somewhere downfield, Republicans will rediscover a semblance of sanity, and she’ll be rewarded for not having lost her marbles.
But that doesn’t diminish the rightness of what she’s doing. Nor does it undercut how unusually independent-minded she is. To wit: She’s not only isolated within the Republican Party. She’s also unlike many other Never Trumpers, whose revulsion at Republicans’ coddling of the former president has led them to insult and attack the party on all sorts of fronts and effectively turned them into provisional, situational Democrats. Cheney, in contrast, votes with the party, holding tight and proudly to her conservative bona fides.
Don’t take it from me. Take it from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the wackadoodle Georgia Republican. “Let me remind everyone, while Democrats are being fooled by Liz Cheney right now, they should remember that she is not a Democrat,” Greene said in January on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast. “As a matter of fact, she has a very conservative voting record — more conservative than some of my Republican colleagues.”
Greene was prompted by reports that Democrats in Wyoming might cross over into the Republican primary to back Cheney, and she added: “Democrats, while you think it’s fun because Liz Cheney is totally dishing on Trump and trying to do everything she can to destroy us and Trump and Ivanka now and all these people, you’re getting tricked. So while you’re going to go vote for her in the Republican primary in Wyoming, you’re voting for a snake that’s going to bite you, too.”
Such venom! And such bunk, inasmuch as Cheney openly disagrees with Democrats about sweeping voting reforms, disagrees with Democrats about the size of Biden’s Build Back Better agenda, disagrees with Democrats about abortion. She has made only limited cause with them. She’s clear about that — and about her passion for that cause, which is to hold Trump accountable once and for all.
I’d say she’s a woman without a country, except she has this country — our country — foremost in her thoughts. She knows what makes it special, and she recognizes what her Republican colleagues in Congress choose to ignore, which is that the “sacred obligation to defend the peaceful transfer of power has been honored by every American president — except one,” as she observed when she received a 2022 Profile in Courage Award from the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation in Boston in April.
“The question for every one of us is, in this time of testing, will we do our duty?” she said, articulating the stakes in a precise and irrefutable manner that will surely stand the test of time. “Or will we look away from danger, ignore the threat, embrace the lies?”
