CONGRESSIONAL
MEMO
House Republicans Have Had Enough of Liz Cheney’s
Truth-Telling
G.O.P. House members are plotting a fresh bid to
dethrone Ms. Cheney from her leadership post. Her transgression: continued
repudiation of Donald J. Trump and his false election claims.
Trump critics like Representative Liz Cheney, who was
once spoken of as a future speaker or president, have been ostracized by
Republicans or are moving toward the exits.
Alfiky/The
New York Times
Nicholas
FandosCatie Edmondson
By Nicholas
Fandos and Catie Edmondson
May 4, 2021
WASHINGTON
— The first time defenders of Donald J. Trump came for Representative Liz
Cheney, for the offense of having voted to impeach him, fellow Republicans
closed ranks to save her leadership post, with Representative Kevin McCarthy
boasting that their “big tent” party had enough room for both the former
president and a stalwart critic.
Evidently,
not anymore.
Just three
months after she beat back a no-confidence vote by lopsided margins, Ms. Cheney
of Wyoming, the No. 3 House Republican, is facing a far more potent challenge
that appears increasingly likely to end in her ouster from leadership. This
time, Mr. McCarthy, the minority leader, is encouraging the effort to replace
her.
Her
transgression, colleagues say: Ms. Cheney’s continued public criticism of Mr.
Trump, her denunciation of his lies about a stolen election and her demands
that the G.O.P. tell the truth about how his supporters assaulted democracy
during the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.
The
turnabout reflects anew the passion with which Republicans have embraced Mr.
Trump and the voters who revere him, and how willing many in the party are to
perpetuate — or at least tolerate — falsehoods about the 2020 election that he
has continued to spread.
What began
as a battle over the party’s future after the violent end to the Trump
presidency has collapsed into a one-sided pile-on by Team Trump, with critics
like Ms. Cheney, the scion of a storied Republican family and the lone woman in
her party’s House leadership, ostracized or moving toward the exits.
The latest
test for Ms. Cheney could come as soon as next week, when a growing group of
Republicans is planning a fresh bid to dethrone her, with Mr. McCarthy’s
blessing. Many of her colleagues are now so confident that it will succeed that
they are openly discussing who will replace Ms. Cheney.
The
tensions escalated on Tuesday, when Mr. McCarthy went on Mr. Trump’s favorite
news program, “Fox & Friends,” to question whether Ms. Cheney could
effectively carry out her role as the party’s top messenger. (Beforehand, he
told a Fox reporter, “I’ve had it with her,” and “I’ve lost confidence,”
according to a leaked recording of the exchange published by Axios.)
“I have
heard from members concerned about her ability to carry out the job as
conference chair, to carry out the message,” Mr. McCarthy said during the
portion of the interview that aired. “We all need to be working as one, if
we’re able to win the majority.”
With
onetime allies closing in, Ms. Cheney, known for her steely temperament, has
only dug in harder. Minutes after Mr. McCarthy’s TV hit, she sent her barbed
reply through a spokesman, effectively suggesting that the minority leader and
Republicans moving against her were complicit in Mr. Trump’s dissembling.
“This is
about whether the Republican Party is going to perpetuate lies about the 2020
election and attempt to whitewash what happened on Jan. 6,” said Jeremy Adler,
the spokesman. “Liz will not do that. That is the issue.”
One of the
few Republican voices willing to rise to Ms. Cheney’s defense was Senator Mitt
Romney of Utah, who has himself come under attack from his party for his
unrepentant criticism of Mr. Trump — even getting booed at the Utah Republican
Party convention on Saturday.
“Every
person of conscience draws a line beyond which they will not go: Liz Cheney
refuses to lie,” Mr. Romney wrote on Twitter. “As one of my Republican Senate
colleagues said to me following my impeachment vote: ‘I wouldn’t want to be a
member of a group that punished someone for following their conscience.’”
Many House
Republicans insist they have no problem with Ms. Cheney’s vote to impeach Mr.
Trump, which she described as a vote of conscience. Nor, they say, are they
bothered by her neoconservative policy positions, which skew — like those of
her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney — toward a hawkishness that is at
odds with the “America First” slant of the party that Mr. Trump cemented.
But they
fear that Ms. Cheney’s refusal to stop criticizing Mr. Trump or condemning the
events of Jan. 6 could weaken the party’s message going into the 2022 midterm
elections, when they hope to portray Democrats as big-government socialists so
villainous they should be voted out of the majority. It has also infuriated Mr.
Trump.
Many,
including Mr. McCarthy, had hoped that after surviving the February vote of no
confidence, Ms. Cheney, as an elected leader, would make like the rest of the
party and simply move on.
Instead,
she has doubled down and at times turned her fire on colleagues. The final
straw for many came last week in Orlando, where Republicans gathered for their
annual policy retreat in hopes of putting on a show of unity.
Ms. Cheney
told Punchbowl News that she would campaign in Wyoming — where she faces a
primary challenge — defending her impeachment vote “every day of the week.” She
told reporters that any lawmaker who led the bid to invalidate President
Biden’s electoral victory in Congress should be disqualified from running for
president. And she broke with leading Republicans when she said a proposed
independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6 riot should focus on the
attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob, rather than scrutinizing violence by
antifa and Black Lives Matter, as Mr. McCarthy and other Republicans have
demanded.
A few days
later, she drew attacks from the right for fist-bumping Mr. Biden at his speech
before a joint session of Congress, and took to Twitter to defend herself for
greeting the president “in a civil, respectful & dignified way.”
“We’re not
sworn enemies,” she wrote. “We’re Americans.”
On Monday,
after Mr. Trump issued a statement calling the 2020 election “fraudulent” and
“THE BIG LIE,” Ms. Cheney quickly tweeted her rebuttal, writing that anyone who
made such claims was “poisoning our democratic system.”
Some
Republicans privately likened her performance to picking at a scab, and many of
Mr. Trump’s allies saw it as an opening to try again to depose her.
“Liz has
attempted (is FAILING badly) to divide our party,” Representative Lance Gooden,
Republican of Texas, wrote on Twitter on Tuesday, emulating Mr. Trump’s caustic
Twitter style. “Trump is still the LEADER of the GOP, Liz! I look forward to
her being removed SOON!”
Ms.
Cheney’s troubles chart a rapid shift for the Republican Party in the few
months since Mr. Trump left Washington. Early on, she was part of a small but
influential group of Republicans that included Senator Mitch McConnell of
Kentucky, the minority leader, and condemned Mr. Trump’s role in stoking the
riot with false claims of a stolen election. But many of those lawmakers have
since gone quiet, leaving Ms. Cheney, who once was enthusiastically spoken of
as a future speaker or president, isolated.
Ms. Cheney
declined through a spokesman to comment, and several of her allies in the House
would not speak on the record in her defense, underscoring the fraught nature
of the vote and the pessimism some of them feel about her chances of surviving
another challenge. A spokeswoman for Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois,
another Republican who voted to impeach Mr. Trump and has been a leading critic
of the former president, said in a statement that the congressman
“unequivocally supports Liz Cheney for conference chair.”
Those who
know her best say privately that Ms. Cheney’s predicament reflects both her
principles and her personality, including a stubborn streak that sometimes
prompts her to act against her self-interest. One ally who has been exasperated
by her in recent months described her actions as classic Liz Cheney: She will
always do what she thinks is right, the Republican said on Tuesday, but she
will just never stop to think she’s wrong.
With Ms.
Cheney hemorrhaging support, Republicans have already begun cycling through
names of possible replacements for a post traditionally seen as a steppingstone
to the top party positions. Mindful of the optics of replacing the only woman
in leadership with another man, Republicans are eyeing choosing a woman.
The leading
contender appears to be Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, a rising
star in her fourth term who has long toiled to increase the number of women in
the Republican ranks and has more recently become a fierce defender of Mr.
Trump.
Ms.
Stefanik, 36, has begun reaching out to Republican lawmakers to gauge their
support, according to two people familiar with the private conversations, and
by Tuesday evening, one of her political aides was retweeting speculation that
she would “make an outstanding conference chair.”
Representative
Guy Reschenthaler of Pennsylvania, a member of the Republican leadership who
initially whipped votes for Ms. Cheney, said that he was counting potential
votes for Ms. Stefanik and believed the job would be hers if she ran.
Republicans
have also floated Representative Jackie Walorski of Indiana as a possible
alternative. As the top Republican on the Ethics Committee, Ms. Walorski this
year successfully balanced the job of condemning Representative Marjorie Taylor
Greene’s past conspiratorial statements while arguing she should not be kicked
off her committees.
Nicholas
Fandos is congressional correspondent, based in Washington. He has covered
Capitol Hill since 2017, chronicling two Supreme Court confirmation fights, two
historic impeachments of Donald J. Trump, and countless bills in between.
@npfandos
Catie
Edmondson is a reporter in the Washington bureau, covering Congress. @CatieEdmondson
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