House Republicans can dance around this all they want but the ‘truth’ IS the Wyoming House Rep, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney , will be changed out for standing up and saying that former Republican President Donald Trump continues to ‘lie’ when he says the 2020 Presidential election was ‘stolen’ from him…
The whole thing is actually sad and distressing ….
The leadership of a political party are bending themselves like pretzels to support a man that does not have a firm grip on reality…And was turned out of office by a margin of Seven Million American voters…
If deposed from the 3 highest spot in the House Republican caucus?
She would be replaced but far less conservative House female….
But one who says outlaid that she supports Trump’s ‘lies’, which is requirement for the job…
House Republican leaders moved quickly on Wednesday to expel Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming from her leadership post for criticizing Donald J. Trump and his election lies, as their No. 2, Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, publicly backed ousting her and the top leader privately lobbied for a replacement.
In a statement, a spokeswoman for Mr. Scalise said he supported Representative Elise Stefanik, the New York Republican who has emerged as the leading contender to replace Ms. Cheney as Republican Conference chair, the No. 3 leadership position. Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader, was less public, but lawmakers said he was pushing colleagues privately to support Ms. Stefanik, a close ally.
“House Republicans need to be solely focused on taking back the House in 2022 and fighting against Speaker Pelosi and President Biden’s radical socialist agenda,” said Lauren Fine, Mr. Scalise’s spokeswoman. “Elise Stefanik is strongly committed to doing that, which is why Whip Scalise has pledged to support her for conference chair.”
It was a remarkable show of force by the party’s top two leaders to run out a once-popular figure now deemed unacceptable by fellow Republicans because she has rejected Mr. Trump’s lies and refused to absolve him or the party of its role in perpetuating the false claims of a fraudulent election that fueled the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
Ms. Stefanik, 36, whose voting record is far less conservative than Ms. Cheney’s, became a vocal supporter of Mr. Trump in recent years, playing a prominent role defending him during his first impeachment trial and voting in January to overturn the results of the 2020 election, which he lost….
Apparently Cheney is not fighting being replaced.
Politico says ,”Cheney has bern telling people that if holding onto her leadership role requires having to lie or stay quiet,she doesn’t believe that’s a price worth paying.”
Props to Cheney!
If Republicans replace Cheney with Stefanik – who has a more moderate voting record, it might be the biggest sign to date that the GOP wants to move on from its more establishment “principles” to whatever Trump is saying at the time.
Incredible times we are in!
Yes Z….
Great point!
Complexity could be rearing it’s head here also…….
What complexity?
His new favorite word.
I don’t think he even knows what it means.
If he does?He doesn’t understand its application as there was nothing in your post to indicate in any way whatsoever any “complexity.”
If ,as we have been told here ,Republicans “really” don’t like Trump?Heres their chance to figuratively kick him in the ass.
The Cheney vote is a secret ballot.Why not ReElect Cheney,then claim you didn’t vote for her?A lie?Sure.So what?Republicans have proven they don’t care about lying.
So ,I presume ,that if even with a secret ballot, these House Republicans vote against Cheney,it’s for one reason and one reason only …Because Donald Trump figuratively, if not literally ,ordered them to.
We’ll see…..
… and because (this is making more Marxist by the minute and by the month) class interests trump (pun unintended but appopriate) everything else, including Republican principles and small-r republican principles.
The champions of small government, slow government, deregulation (i.e. unrestrained free license for corporations and property-owners) and a conservative judiciary think they have to stick together no matter what (Jan. 6th; the Big Lie) because they and their donors can’t afford to be split.
So they (see, for example, one K. McCarthy) stomp down on the Never-Trumpers because it’s infinitely more dangerous to show daylight between themselves and Trump with his popular and media base.
¶ Imagine the same dilemma in a mirror reflection. Fortunately, the ever-visible Al Sharpton and co., have never amassed a crazy-left (not just very progressive), super-woke base that can threaten Joe Biden’s allies.
Is complexity replacing “we’ll see” or is it the new “what about?”
Kevin McCarthy has his marching orders, he will remove Liz or see his chance to be Speaker go up in smoke.
He says nothing about Matt Gaetz but trashes Liz Cheney.
It’s Trump’s party.
Nope Keith….
My dictionary grows more complex‼️
Your dictionary is growing more complex? I am afraid to ask what you think that means.
Liz Cheney has a WashPost Op-Ed out
Amazing to watch DC reporters’ amazement at the Liz Cheney Op-Ed because she shares indisputable facts about what happened on 1/6 in plain words that should not have to be characterized as “opinion” but that many reporters are afraid to use. out
Amazing to watch DC reporters’ amazement at the Liz Cheney Op-Ed because she shares indisputable facts about what happened on 1/6 in plain words that should not have to be characterized as “opinion” but that many reporters are afraid to use.
Meredith Shiner
Oh SNAP!
The writer of this piece used the words ‘civil war’ with the Republicans?
I guess they didn’t get the memo from here?
The GOP civil war is heating up as top Republicans are on a mission to boot Liz Cheney from her leadership position. @RyanLizza breaks down the latest infighting in the Republican Party, and what that means for the diminishing group of anti-Trump Republicans.
Politico via twitter
As usual,you miss the point.
The last sentence says it all…
“…and what it means for the DIMINISHING (emphasis added) group of anti Trump Republicans”
Apparently the writer thinks the “war” is about over and Trump has won!
Oh Snap!The writer didn’t get your memo that Trumps hold on the party is lessening everyday!
I won’t even get into the fact that you yourself has quit using that term,”civil war.”
Even when trying to be clever?You come out of it,looking like the fool.
Yeah a war can “heat up” just before the obviously dominant player unleashes a crippling assault on the underdog.
I think that’s what is going to happen here with Cheney.
Interesting. The Club for Growth only gave Stefanik a rating of 44%. It gave Cheney a rating of 78%.
Yes Z…..
Stefanik is NOT said to be a rightwingnut…..
Complex?
Or a sneaky way to crawl away from the wing nuts?
Correction
Was NOT a rightwingnut…..
She NOW accepts the Trump lie….
But Zreebs Cheney supported Trump at a higher rate than Stefanik. But on the one vote that really mattered to Trump she didn’t. So bye-bye.
Anyway you cut this Trump wins and has essentially humiliated a bunch of ball less Republicans into, once again, doing his dirty work. Even without the power of the Presidency. How can he manage that?
Dick Cheney needs to take McCarthy hunting.
Cheney Saga Boils the GOP Down to Its Essence
Playbook: “The all-but-certain decision by House Republicans to oust Conference Chair Liz Cheney (R-WY) looks like one of those historical hinge moments — a party solidifying around the idea of loyalty to a single person, one who is obsessed with repeating crackpot lies about election fraud, rather than to policy or ideas.”
Now Liz Cheney Faces Tough Re-Election
“Rep. Liz Cheney’s colleagues are set to boot her from House GOP leadership this month. Now Republicans back in her home state of Wyoming are plotting how to remove her from Congress entirely,” Politico reports.
“There is no shortage of Republicans eager to take on Cheney in a 2022 primary since her vote to impeach President Donald Trump and her subsequent criticism of him tanked her popularity in Wyoming. But the crowded field is also a risk for the anti-Cheney forces, making it more possible for her to win with a plurality.”
Washington Post: How Liz Cheney became increasingly isolated.
‘To be in Trump’s party?
You have to accept a Lie’
John King …CNN
The NY House Rep should be a lock
Elise Stefanik Pledges Allegiance to Trump
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), campaigning to oust Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) as the Republican Party’s No. 3 leader in the House for calling out President Donald Trump’s election lies, pitched herself as an unshakable ally of the former president on Thursday, calling him the “strongest supporter of any president when it comes to standing up for the Constitution,” the New York Times reports.
Washington Post: Stefanik defends election falsehoods told on January 6.
Keith, I’m still rooting for Cheney – even though I don’t see how she hangs on.
In 2021, , having a Republican that supports democracy is about the best we can expect!
Agreed Zreebs.
But in this one dimensional world here, when Cheney loses it will be interpreted as loss for Trump. “Because the party is moving on.”
It’s moving just the way most autocrats move.
I’m confused. I assume you meant to say that a Cheney loss will be viewed as a win for Trump.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) officially backed Rep. Elise Stefanik (N.Y.) to replace Rep. Liz Cheney (Wyo.) as the Republican conference chair during an appearance on Fox News.
“Yes, I do,” he said when asked by “Sunday Morning Futures” host Maria Bartiromo whether he supported Stefanik as the party’s future No. 3 leader in the House.
It is the first time that McCarthy has officially endorsed Stefanik as a replacement for Cheney, though Axios reported last week that the GOP leader had said he had “had it with her” — meaning Cheney — during an off-air conversation with Fox News’s Steve Doocy that was caught on a live microphone….
More….
McCarthy should wear a poster around his neck…
“Owned and operated by Trump,Donald J.Contact for further info.”
Having made that sarcastic remark?He ls likely the next Speaker of the House.
<b.Stripped of his megaphone and much of his influence, Trump still holds GOP in his thrall
By Jess Bidgood, Boston Globe Staff
“… But it is becoming increasingly clear that the ex-president no longer needs the social media platforms that nurtured his devoted following and rocketed him to the presidency in 2016 to exert an iron grip over his party or keep his lies about election fraud in 2020 percolating among his base.
This week alone, Cheney, a daughter of the Republican establishment who has long commanded deep respect from her party, appeared poised to be expelled from party leadership over her refusal to go along with Trump’s lies about the election — showing Trump can still foment a mutiny in Congress even as his voice gets softer nationally. His favored candidate came out on top in a special election in Texas. And a Republican-ordered audit of the 2020 election results in the biggest county in Arizona, an unusual and unnecessary process his supporters are hoping will give cause to the baseless distrust in the outcome, dragged on.
It all points to a strange, almost-backwards dynamic in the GOP after Trump’s presidency: Even as his megaphone gets tinnier, as the tool that forged his political persona eludes his grip, his influence over the party he remade is only getting stronger.
“There’s no real evidence that voters have distanced themselves from him, there’s no real evidence that elected officials have changed their tune on him — if anything, they are more loyal to him than ever before,” said Brendan Buck, a Republican strategist and a former aide to the erstwhile House speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan who is troubled by his party’s direction.
“Donald Trump,” he added, “is much bigger than any one medium of communication.”
His banishment from the social platforms for inciting an insurrection has also fed into a victimhood narrative among his base that has largely prevented Republicans from questioning why he lost in the first place — or laying any blame at his feet.
“This sort of deepens the view of Republicans generally that he’s a martyr, that he was sacrificed by media and Big Tech,” said Scott Jennings, a Republican consultant who previously worked on campaigns for Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell. “His leadership of the party is at the moment unquestioned.”….
https://www.bostonglobe.com/2021/05/05/nation/stripped-his-megaphone-much-his-influence-trump-still-holds-gop-his-thrall/
Last August, my former Globe colleague Larry Tye made an interesting comparison between Cheney and Margaret Chase Smith, the Maine Republican — and only female member of the US Senate at the time — who took on that era’s demagogue, Joseph McCarthy.
Tye, who wrote a biography of McCarthy last summer called “Demogogue,” says that Smith and the Wisconsin senator started out as friends, but that Smith’s breaking point came when McCarthy gave a speech in February, 1950, in Wheeling, West Virginia, in which he claimed that the State Department was riddled with Communists.
That June, Smith denounced McCarthy from the Senate floor “without naming him, or needing to,” Tye said. Some of her speech:
Those of us who shout the loudest about Americanism in making character assassinations are all too frequently those who, by our own words and acts, ignore some of the basic principles of Americanism: The right to criticize; The right to hold unpopular beliefs; The right to protest; The right of independent thought.
She then read a “Declaration of Conscience” that called for civility and bipartisanship and was co-signed by six moderate Republicans.
The backlash against her from McCarthy and Republicans afraid to cross him (sound familiar?) was swift. She was called sexist names, McCarthy dumped her from his committee, and then put up a candidate to run against her in the Maine GOP primary. (Smith won.)
She later said the whole experience left her feeling “bedraggled, unappreciated, and sorely in need of a change in focus.”
But you know what? Her Declaration of Conscience lives on, the most famous speech of that deplorable chapter in history.
Will Cheney’s WaPo essay do the same?
— Teresa Hanafin in The Boston Globe’s “Fast Forward” newsletter.
I was somewhat familiar with Margaret Chase Smith’s battles with McCarthy, but you provided interesting info that I do not know. Thanks for sharing.
Best wishes to Cheney!
Read Liz Cheney’s op-ed on her home page at House.gov if, like me you’ve used up all your free peeks at the WashPost and hit a paywall.
https://cheney.house.gov/2021/05/05/wapo-rep-cheney-the-gop-is-at-a-turning-point-history-is-watching-us/
The Washington Post: The GOP Is At A Turning Point; History Is Watching Us
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY)
May 5, 2021
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/05/05/liz-cheney-republican-party-turning-point/
In public statements again this week, former president Donald Trump has repeated his claims that the 2020 election was a fraud and was stolen. His message: I am still the rightful president, and President Biden is illegitimate. Trump repeats these words now with full knowledge that exactly this type of language provoked violence on Jan. 6. And, as the Justice Department and multiple federal judges have suggested, there is good reason to believe that Trump’s language can provoke violence again. Trump is seeking to unravel critical elements of our constitutional structure that make democracy work — confidence in the result of elections and the rule of law. No other American president has ever done this.
The Republican Party is at a turning point, and Republicans must decide whether we are going to choose truth and fidelity to the Constitution. In the immediate wake of the violence of Jan. 6, almost all of us knew the gravity and the cause of what had just happened — we had witnessed it firsthand.
House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy (Calif.) left no doubt in his public remarks. On the floor of the House on Jan. 13, McCarthy said: “The president bears responsibility for Wednesday’s attack on Congress by mob rioters. He should have immediately denounced the mob when he saw what was unfolding.” Now, McCarthy has changed his story.
I am a conservative Republican, and the most conservative of conservative values is reverence for the rule of law. Each of us swears an oath before God to uphold our Constitution. The electoral college has spoken. More than 60 state and federal courts, including multiple Trump-appointed judges, have rejected the former president’s arguments, and refused to overturn election results. That is the rule of law; that is our constitutional system for resolving claims of election fraud.
The question before us now is whether we will join Trump’s crusade to delegitimize and undo the legal outcome of the 2020 election, with all the consequences that might have. I have worked overseas in nations where changes in leadership come only with violence, where democracy takes hold only until the next violent upheaval. America is exceptional because our constitutional system guards against that. At the heart of our republic is a commitment to the peaceful transfer of power among political rivals in accordance with law. President Ronald Reagan described this as our American “miracle.”
While embracing or ignoring Trump’s statements might seem attractive to some for fundraising and political purposes, that approach will do profound long-term damage to our party and our country. Trump has never expressed remorse or regret for the attack of Jan. 6 and now suggests that our elections, and our legal and constitutional system, cannot be trusted to do the will of the people. This is immensely harmful, especially as we now compete on the world stage against Communist China and its claims that democracy is a failed system.
For Republicans, the path forward is clear.
First, support the ongoing Justice Department criminal investigations of the Jan. 6 attack. Those investigations must be comprehensive and objective; neither the White House nor any member of Congress should interfere.
Second, we must support a parallel bipartisan review by a commission with subpoena power to seek and find facts; it will describe for all Americans what happened. This is critical to defeat the misinformation and nonsense circulating in the press and on social media. No currently serving member of Congress — with an eye to the upcoming election cycle — should participate. We should appoint former officials, members of the judiciary and other prominent Americans who can be objective, just as we did after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The commission should be focused on the Jan. 6 attacks. The Black Lives Matter and antifa violence of last summer was illegal and reprehensible, but it is a different problem with a different solution.
Finally, we Republicans need to stand for genuinely conservative principles, and steer away from the dangerous and anti-democratic Trump cult of personality. In our hearts, we are devoted to the American miracle. We believe in the rule of law, in limited government, in a strong national defense, and in prosperity and opportunity brought by low taxes and fiscally conservative policies.
There is much at stake now, including the ridiculous wokeness of our political rivals, the irrational policies at the border and runaway spending that threatens a return to the catastrophic inflation of the 1970s. Reagan formed a broad coalition from across the political spectrum to return America to sanity, and we need to do the same now. We know how. But this will not happen if Republicans choose to abandon the rule of law and join Trump’s crusade to undermine the foundation of our democracy and reverse the legal outcome of the last election.
History is watching. Our children are watching. We must be brave enough to defend the basic principles that underpin and protect our freedom and our democratic process. I am committed to doing that, no matter what the short-term political consequences might be.