I have to pinch myself every time I find myself praising Liz Cheney. Almost everything she stands for, I stand against. Almost everything I stand for, she stands against.
Except one thing: keeping our democracy honest and alive.
If the daughter of the widely-reviled Vice President Dick Cheney were doing to her father what Ron Reagan Jr. and his sister Patti Davis have done to theirs, speaking out and sometimes even denouncing his policies when holding such power, it would be a big story. But politically, Liz is on her father’s side. She was before, she is now. (And to his credit in the case of condemning Donald Trump, he’s on hers.)
To wit, for her votes in Congress, she has a lifetime favorable rating of 76.6% from the American Conservative Union. Heritage Action for America rates her even higher, at 80%. Ironically, that’s 30% higher than its rating for Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, who replaced Cheney in the #3 Republican leadership position in the House when Cheney fell out of favor and lost her job
Maybe the most telling testament that Liz Cheney is a true conservative is that in the four years of Donald Trump’s presidency, she voted with him 92.9% of the time.
But did you hear her indictment of the former president at the first televised hearing of the January 6th Committee after she recited the list of particulars against him? "President Trump,” she said in summary, “summoned the mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack.”
As columnist Frank Bruni wrote, “While nearly all the other Republicans in Congress keep changing their tunes to harmonize with Trump, she refuses to sing along. She’s all in and she’s all steel.”
By flying in the face of her own party’s orthodoxy, Liz Cheney is not renouncing her credentials as a conservative. She is reinforcing her credentials as a patriot.
Patriotism and principle both, tragically, no longer are trademarks of Trump’s Republican Party.
The non-partisan website The Hill interviewed a Republican member of the House who told them that Liz Cheney’s exile from the modern mainstream of the party “is about Liz Cheney being completely out of synch with the majority of our conference.” When you look at the dishonest, duplicitous, dissembling direction of the GOP conference, that is a badge of honor.
Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who belongs in a straightjacket, not in Congress, called Liz Cheney “a snake.” That too is a badge of honor.
Donald Trump calls her “a smug fool,” and, “worse than any Democrat.” Coming from a man like him, that’s the most precious badge of honor of all.
Earlier this week, we got a chilling look at some Americans’ appalling attitudes about January 6th. It didn’t come from the usual suspects, unprincipled politicians twisting themselves into pretzels to keep their jobs and ward off Donald Trump’s vengeful wrath, but from a coach with Washington DC’s recently renamed football team The Commanders. His name is Jack Del Rio and when talking with reporters, he compared the insurrection to the Black Lives Matter protests of the past few years, complaining, “People's livelihoods are being destroyed, businesses are being burned down. No problem. And then we have a dust-up at the Capitol. Nothing burned down, and we're going to make that a major deal?”
If you’ve seen video of the attack, whether previously aired or, in the case of some of the video shown at the hearing, never seen before, it wasn’t a “dust-up,” it wasn’t what some of the whitewashers in the GOP have minimized as a “tourist visit” to the Capitol on January 6th There wasn’t, as Trump preposterously claimed half a year later, “love in the air.”
The only thing in the air was insurrection. An attempt to subvert our democracy. An attempted coup d’etat.
“On the morning of January 6th,” Congresswoman Cheney said in her opening remarks, “President Donald Trump’s intention was to remain president of the United States, despite the lawful outcome of the 2020 election and in violation of his Constitutional obligation to relinquish power.”
As columnist Bruni wrote, “I keep waiting for Liz Cheney to flinch. But no.”
That’s why she’s now an official non-person in the Republican Party. She’s willing to assert what shamefully few of her fellow Republicans in Congress are willing to admit. She’s a non-person because she calls them out on it.
That’s why she ended her remarks with a wholehearted warning to them: “There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone. Your dishonor will remain.”
I hope— because of her principles and despite her politics— so will Liz Cheney.
Over almost five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He has covered presidencies and politics at home and international crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, and the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists.
Liz Chaney I’d doing what most people republicans should be doing. Protecting our democracy. If she succeeds she would have fulfilled her obligation and commitment to her position and her patriotism to a torn country.
Bravo Mr Dobbs. Bravo Liz.