Finally Someone Asked Liz Cheney If DeSantis Is As Bad As Trump
Over the weekend, Liz Cheney was one of the keynote speakers at the annual Texas Tribune Festival. The paper’s CEO, Evan Smith, who introduced her, noted that most of the people there “are old enough to remember when Representative Cheney was a conservative standard bearer, widely seen as a short walk ideologically from her father, the former vice president. She still is. She has not changed. Her party has.” Well… that’s mostly right. Although she has become a little less hard core in her conservatism. She votes a little more frequently with Democrats on some big issues now that she would have ever considered in the past. Her overall lifetime ProgressivePunch crucial vote score in 3.94. Her score for the current session is 7.24, still dismally right-wing but the 5th most progressive of any House Republican!
“Trump allies,” Smith continued, “call her a RINO.” He pointed out that she voted more frequently with Trump (92.9%) than any of Texas’ outright fascists in Congress, including Louie Gohmert, Michael Cloud, Beth Van Duyne. Cheney said she had no regrets about voting against the first impeachment and voting for Trump against Hillary. She does say she regrets having voted for Trump in 2020, though she would not have voted for Biden either.
When Smith asked her if she would consider running for president, she said should would “certainly do whatever it takes to make sure Donald Trump isn't anywhere close to the Oval Office… I’m going to make sure [Trump] is not the nominee. And if he is the nominee, I won't be a Republican.” He had also asked her whether she would prefer Democrats keep the majority in the House and that there’s a need to put that above her policy differences with the Democrats. “It’s a tough question. I think that the policies of the Biden administration, there are a lot of bad policies, for example– what we’re seeing now with inflation, what we're seeing with respect to government spending. I think it's really important though, as voters are going to vote, that they recognize and understand what the Republican Conference consists of in the House of Representatives today, and how much power the election deniers, the people like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert and Jim Jordan, how much power those people will have in a Republican majority… Partisanship has to have a limit. There's got to be an end.”
Though I would have loved it if Smith asked her to explain the difference between Trump and… say Ron DeSantis, he moved instead to give her an opportunity to talk about not supporting MAGA-Republicans, like Harriet Hageman in Wyoming, who are making false claims about the 2020 election. “There are many people around this country who are making claims they know not to be true and I don’t think anybody should vote for any of them.” That pretty much includes a super-majority of her party’s candidates.
Jonathan Karl had her on This Week yesterday and she went a little further in explaining that. She said that Republican voters by and large “continue to believe the lie. They continue to believe what he's saying, which is very dangerous. I think it also tells you that large portions of our party, including the leadership of our party, both at a state level in Wyoming as well as on a national level with the RNC, is very sick. And that you know, we really have got to decide whether or not we're going to be a party based on substance and policy or whether we're going to remain, as so many of our party are today, in the grips of a dangerous former president… [W]hat I'm fighting for is the Constitution. What I'm fighting for is a perpetuation of the republic. What I'm fighting for is the rule of law, the fact that everybody's got to abide by the rule of law. What I'm fighting for is the fact that elections have to matter and that, when the election is over, and the courts have ruled and the Electoral College has met, that the president of the United States has to respect the results of the election. What I'm fighting for is the principle that we have a peaceful transition of power and that we don't determine the— who rules based upon violence. And if Donald Trump's spokesman says that those are principles that are inconsistent with Donald Trump's views and inconsistent with the Republican Party's views, I think ought to give every American pause about who Donald Trump is and about what the Republican Party stands for today.”
Karl asked her if her new organization is going to get “involved in campaigns against those Republican candidates that are challenging or denying the results of the election?” Her response was pretty straight forward: “Yes.”
KARL: Is the country better or worse off if Kevin McCarthy is the next speaker of the House?
CHENEY: Well, my views about Kevin McCarthy are very clear. The speaker of the House is the second in line for the presidency. It requires somebody who understands and recognizes their duty, their oath, their obligation.
And he's been completely unfaithful to the Constitution and demonstrated a total lack of understanding of the significance and the importance of the role of speaker. So I don't believe he should be speaker of the House. And you know, I think that's been very clear.
KARL: So it sounds like that's a yes. You think the country would be worse off if he were speaker of the House.
CHENEY: I don't believe he should be speaker of the House.
…KARL: But is the threat Trump or is it bigger than Trump? I mean, you could argue that Trumpism, in terms of the election denying and all of that, is— has taken over the party. I mean, would Ron DeSantis be any better than Donald Trump?
CHENEY: Donald Trump is certainly the center of the threat. And I think that, you know, what he's done and what he's created is a movement on some level that is post-truth. And I think that, you know, certainly social media has added to that.
But election denial, denying a fundamental function and principle, you know, the— what is at the center of our constitutional republic-- is dangerous, broadly speaking. And he is certainly leading that effort and leading that movement.
And he also, because— we know precisely what he will do, because he has done it. You know, sending an armed mob here to the Capitol to try to overturn the results of an election. There's just simply no way that the nation can, in my view, sustain itself if we excuse that and put him in a position of power again.
…KARL: So you’ve said you're going to work against election deniers. If it's not Trump and if it’s— if it's somebody like Ron DeSantis, Ted Cruz, Josh Hawley, these are all people that have tied themselves very closely to Trump, will you oppose them? Could you see yourself supporting any of them?
CHENEY: It would be very difficult. I think that a fundamental— a fundamental question for me in terms of whether or not someone is fit to be president is whether they've abided by their constitutional obligations in the past.
And I think, certainly, when you look at somebody like Josh Hawley or somebody like Ted Cruz, both of whom know better— both of whom know exactly what the role of Congress is in terms of our constitutional obligations with respect to presidential elections— and yet, both of whom took steps that fundamentally threatened the constitutional order and structure in the aftermath of the last election.
So in my view, they both have made themselves unfit for future office.
KARL: What about DeSantis?
CHENEY: Look, I think that DeSantis is somebody who is, right now, campaigning for election deniers. And I think that, you know, that is something that I think people have got to have real pause about. You know, either you fundamentally believe in and will support our constitutional structure, or you don't.
Asked by a self-described conservative member of the audience at the Texas Tribune shindig who believes the 2020 election was legitimate whether or not to abstain in the midterms rather than vote for an election denier, Cheney emphatically said "no" suggesting instead to vote against the election denier. Man, is she burning bridges back to the Republican Party!