When it comes to crucial votes, Liz Cheney’s lifetime score is an abysmal 3.54%, slightly to the right of Q-Anon queens Marjorie Traitor Greene (4.13%) and Lauren Boebert (4.59), though not quite as extreme as Jay Obernolte (2.74%), Claudia Tenney (2.52%) or Kevin McCarthy (1.37%). But that isn’t the voting record of a “moderate.” It’s the voting record of a hard core conservative.
She has rejected Trumpism and fascism and is eager to restore the GOP to what she thinks of as the glory days of conservative greed and bigotry, her parents’ kind of conservatism. Jonathan Martin, reporting for the NY Times yesterday, wrote that Cheney feels the most important thing she could be doing now isn’t trying to get reelected— she knows that is hopeless— but “ridding American politics of Trump and his influence.”
She’s using the select committee as “a proving ground for her new crusade. She used the only debate to tell voters to ‘vote for somebody else’ if they wanted a politician who would violate their oath of office. Last week, she enlisted her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, to cut an ad calling Mr. Trump a ‘coward’ who represents the greatest threat to America in the history of the republic. ‘If the cost of standing up for the Constitution is losing the House seat, then that’s a price I’m willing to pay,’ she said in an interview last week… Cheney’s relentless focus on Mr. Trump has driven speculation— even among longtime family friends— that she is preparing to run for president. She has done little to dissuade such talk… Cheney said she has no interest in changing parties: ‘I’m a Republican.’ But when asked if the GOP she was raised in was even salvageable in the short term, she said: ‘It may not be’ and called her party ‘very sick.’ The party, she said ‘is continuing to drive itself in a ditch and I think it’s going to take several cycles if it can be healed.’”
She says she could support a Republican for president in 2024, but only one who admitted that Trump lost the legitimate 2020 election. So forget DeSantis.
In a sign that Cheney’s political wakening goes beyond her contempt for Trump, she said she prefers the ranks of Democratic women with national security backgrounds to her party’s right flank.
“I would much rather serve with Mikie Sherrill and Chrissy Houlahan and Elissa Slotkin than Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, even though on substance certainly I have big disagreements with the Democratic women I just mentioned, Cheney said in the interview. “But they love this country, they do their homework and they are people that are trying to do the right thing for the country.”
…Today, Cheney doesn’t concede specific regrets about helping to create the atmosphere that gave rise to Trump’s takeover of her party. She did however, acknowledge a “reflexive partisanship that I have been guilty of” and noted that Jan. 6 “demonstrated how dangerous that is.”
Sorry, but she played an out-sized role in creating a Republican Party where conservatives like herself are no longer welcome. There are plenty of them and the one place I don’t want to see them wind up is the Democratic Party, where there are already too many like Mikie Sherrill, Chrissy Houlahan and Elissa Slotkin. How did she forget Abigail Spanberger and Elaine Luria? The Democratic Party has strayed further and further away from the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt vision and much closer to a Republican-lite Bill Clinton vision, not to mention Ronald Reagan.
I no longer consider myself part of the Democratic Party, although I’m a registered Democrat and vote in Democratic Party primaries. If conservatives like Cheney— and The Bulwark crew, for example— migrate into the Democratic Party, what I'd be looking for is some segment of the Progressive Caucus, probably less than half, to start a progressive party, giving non-conservative Democrats a home. I mean a fascist GOP vs a conservative Democratic Party will leave a lot to be desired in American politics.