The day before the country woke up from vacation, one of the most powerful families in Republican politics issued a direct rebuke to President Trump.
Dick Cheney, the former vice president, and Liz Cheney, the third Republican in the House of Representatives, used their significant political capital and decades of experience in Washington to attack the president’s false allegations of vote theft and his undemocratic effort to overturn the election, which President-elect Joe Biden won.
It was a significant moment because of Liz Cheney’s upward political trajectory, and put her on the front lines of the Republican Party that refused to yield to Trump’s coup attempt.
Cheney, a 54-year-old congresswoman from Wyoming, released a 21-page memo that criticized attempts by some Republicans in Congress to challenge the election results, which they plan to do on Wednesday. The memo included a complete compendium of all the ways in which state and federal courts rejected and rejected the charges of cheating.
“In opposing the electoral plates, members are inevitably claiming that Congress has the authority to override elections and override state and federal courts. These objections set an exceptionally dangerous precedent, threatening to steal the states’ explicit constitutional responsibility for choosing the president and assigning it to Congress. This is in direct conflict with the clear text of the Constitution and our fundamental beliefs as Republicans, ”wrote Cheney in the memo, published on Sunday.
As for Sen. Ted Cruz’s proposal, R-Texas, to form a committee to conduct “a 10-day emergency audit of election results,” Cheney responded with barely concealed contempt.
“Did the proponents of a new commission realize that, in essence, they proposed to postpone the inauguration? They intended to set a new future precedent in which investiture is postponed and we have an ‘incumbent President?’ For how long? Who decides when this process ends? Will this require another Congressional Act? Could the incumbent president veto any future Congressional action? If Congress has the authority to create such a commission now, do state elections, recounts and state legal challenges just ‘work’ until Congress starts investigating and deciding who should be the president? ”Cheney wrote.
The memo clearly explained how the United States Constitution does not give Congress any role in the presidential decision, unless no one has a majority of the votes of the Electoral College. Biden defeated Trump in the November 3 election by winning 306 votes from the Electoral College against 232 from Trump.
“To replace our views with the votes of the people in the states … would be to establish a tyranny of Congress and steal the power of the states and the people in those states,” Cheney wrote in a Facebook post on Monday.
On the same day that Cheney released his memo, all 10 living ex-defense secretaries wrote an article in the Washington Post warning that any attempt to use the US military to contest the election would take the country into “dangerous, illegal and unconstitutional. “He also said that any military personnel who participated in such an anti-democratic action” would be responsible, including potentially facing criminal penalties, for the serious consequences of their actions in our republic. “
The article was organized and led by his 79-year-old father, who was Defense Secretary to President George HW Bush from 1989 to 1993.
The Cheneys are not the only prominent Republicans to reject the fall in the illusion in which Trump has taken millions of Republicans. In the Senate, Republicans Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Mitt Romney of Utah have vigorously called Trump’s lies. Meanwhile, some of the most conservative Republican members of the House, like Congressman Chip Roy and Congressman Ken Buck, rejected the idea of contesting the Electoral College vote this week.
Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell urged Senate Republicans not to vote against the election results. And former mayor Paul Ryan, R-Wis., Has also delivered a strong criticism of Cruz and others like Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., Who plan to run for election this week. “It is difficult to conceive of a more anti-democratic and anti-conservative act,” said Ryan.
Former Senator John Danforth, a Republican who represented Missouri for almost 20 years and gave Hawley his endorsement in 2018, called you out By the name. “Giving credit to Trump’s false claim that the election was stolen is a highly destructive attack on our constitutional government. It is the opposite of conservative; it’s radical, ”said Danforth.
But there are few Republicans in American political life who have developed more fearsome reputations for political battle than the Cheneys, especially since Dick Cheney’s tenure as vice president from 2001 to 2009. After the September 11 attacks, Dick Cheney became if even more difficult. attacked the line of defense of what he already was and exceeded the limits of law and ethics by defending interrogation practices seen by many as torture. Nicknamed “Darth Vader” by friends and foes, his views on national security were so adamant that, over time, he even alienated President George W. Bush to some degree.
Barbara Comstock, a former Republican member of Congress who worked in the George W. Bush administration, said the Cheney family has the stomach for the kind of reaction brought on by facing Trump.
“When you’ve been through these battles before and everyone goes after you, you’re not so intimidated by it,” said Comstock, an ally of Liz Cheney. “After they tore you up and you survived, it’s’ Hey, I’m here to do the job. I will not be bullied or bullied. ‘”
Comstock noted that many members of Congress from predominantly conservative districts “are not used to” criticism from their own side.
As for the maneuver of Hawley, Cruz and others to challenge the election results, Comstock said “he is dumb and more dumb and he is lazy”.
“The Cheneys have had to put a lot of effort into politics and are not disrespecting people when they need to say difficult things. They have done this before and have taken the slings and arrows and are willing to do that, ”she said.
Liz Cheney held important positions in the State Department during the presidency of George W. Bush, but his entry into the race for a political position had an ignominious start. In 2013, she faced the primary challenge of an incumbent Republican senator, Mike Enzi, who was considering retiring but postponed retirement by six years in part because of Cheney’s failure to wait for him to make a decision. Cheney ended up giving up on the race.
But since his election to the House in 2016, Cheney has risen rapidly through the ranks of the Republican leadership, despite his stellar relationship with the White House. Although she voted with Trump’s wishes most of the time, she also rejected him and sometimes publicly called him.
When she refused the opportunity to take Enzi’s seat last fall, it caught the attention of minority leader in the House, Kevin McCarthy, as well as minority leader in the House, Deputy Steve Scalise. Both McCarthy and Scalise would like to be the president of the House if Republicans regain a majority in the House in 2022 or 2024, and Cheney is now clearly signaling that he is likely to arm himself for that post as well.
Steve Schmidt, a former Republican agent who co-founded the Lincoln anti-Trump Project, said that after this week’s polls at the Electoral College, McCarthy “will be the leader of the Chamber Autocrats and [Cheney] it will be the leader of the Chamber’s conservatives. “
At the same time, there are some dissenting voices on the right who have observed the Cheneys over the years and see more political calculation in Liz Cheney’s latest moves than courage.
“I don’t understand why they didn’t do this in a while, and I think it’s opportunistic for her to get up afterwards [Trump’s] it was fully established as a threat to America, ”said a Republican operative who has watched the Cheneys for decades, but declined to be named. “Facing it now, when it will not work at all, there is no political cost.”
A look at the comments section below Cheney’s Facebook post, however, suggests that she will have to prepare to receive a lot of criticism, at least in the next few days. And Trump, who remains popular among Republican Party bases, has repeatedly promised that he will seek revenge on Republican lawmakers who refute his attempts to remain in power.
“I will never forget!” he tweeted on Christmas Eve.
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