Liz Cheney Chooses Her Own Path, and It's a Perilous One

CHEYENNE, Wyo. — Liz Cheney was getting so many questions from constituents and colleagues about whether she would vote to affirm the 2020 election results that she responded in a way befitting her background as a State Department diplomat and lawyer: She issued a 21-page memo detailing the constitutional and legal reasons Congress should not interfere with certification.

Doing so, she wrote, would set “an exceptionally dangerous precedent” that no Republican should want to be associated with.

Cheney was right about the danger. But she was wrong about the willingness of her fellow Republicans to go along with it. In the House, two-thirds of them voted against certification. A week later, only nine others voted with her to impeach former President Donald Trump for encouraging a mob of his supporters to besiege the Capitol on Jan. 6.

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Now Cheney, the lone representative for Wyoming and the No. 3-ranking Republican in the House, is the most visible and imperiled target of the pro-Trump majority in the GOP, which wants to make actions like hers a disqualifying offense for any party member seeking office. A campaign backed by members of Trump’s family and some of his allies in Congress threatens to force her out of her position in House leadership. On Wednesday in Washington, she will attend a private House Republican meeting where lawmakers will have the opportunity to confront her in person.

At home in Wyoming, the sense of betrayal among Republicans is burning hot at the moment. It’s especially acute among the conservative grassroots and local party activists whose strong presence in the state helped deliver Trump his largest margin of victory anywhere — beating Joe Biden with 70% of the vote.

At least one conservative state lawmaker — who described the impeachment vote as “an ice pick in the back” by Republicans who supported it — has printed “Impeach Liz Cheney!” yard signs and is vowing to challenge her in 2022. Ten county-level Republican Party organizations have voted to censure Cheney in recent days, and more are expected to follow suit.

People close to Cheney, who insisted on anonymity so they could discuss her private views, said that her break with the pro-Trump faction reflected her belief that many more Republicans share her disgust with how seriously Trump undermined confidence in the country’s electoral system.

As she watched Trump and his supporters peddle conspiracy theories and promote what she called “the big lie,” Cheney became deeply unsettled by how many of her colleagues seemed so cavalier about Trump’s actions, friends and associates said. She was also bothered by the way Republicans cheered and mimicked the kind of behavior she expected of a foreign authoritarian leader but never from a U.S. president.

In conversations with colleagues, Cheney, 54, has said she hopes her example makes more Republicans in and out of public office comfortable acknowledging that they should have pushed back earlier.

Her allies said that attempts to punish her were counterproductive at a time when the party should be united in opposition to Democratic control of Washington.

“The beneficiaries of Republican fratricide are Democrats,” said Karl Rove, a former Bush strategist who is close to the Cheney family. “So the more we have purity tests and everyone has to think and act alike, particularly when it comes to former President Trump, it’s only helping Democrats.”

But many of her constituents see no problem with making an example of her.

A rally outside the state Capitol last week headlined by Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., a Trump loyalist, drew several hundred people. They chanted “No more Cheney!” and cheered as Gaetz ripped into “Never Trump” Republicans, calling them relics from a party that Trump has transformed from its days under the leadership of the Bushes and Cheney’s father, former Vice President Dick Cheney.

“We control the true spirit and identity of America,” said Gaetz, who is leading the effort to oust Liz Cheney from the House leadership.

After his speech, Teresa Kunkel, a retired state employee, said that she had attended the rally because, as a Christian, she did not believe Cheney was being an honest representative for Wyoming. “She didn’t represent what we voted for,” Kunkel said. “She betrayed us — big time.”

The second impeachment of Trump last month, which Cheney supported, was an injustice, Kunkel added. “It’s like: ‘I didn’t like what you did, so you’re out. And we’re in the majority, so we can do that.’ That’s cancel culture,” she said.

Still, the push for Cheney’s removal from leadership — a step that lawmakers rarely take against members of their own party — may not foreshadow the end of her political career in Wyoming, where the Cheney family is still widely respected.

The fondness with which residents speak of Cheney’s father, and the esteem he still brings to this state that is home to only 580,000 people, suggest that many voters will grant Liz Cheney, now entering her third term, a degree of independence from Trump that other Republicans don’t enjoy.

The campaign to censure her has also triggered a very different response from moderate Republicans who feel more at home in the party of the Bushes and the Cheneys than they do in the party of Trump. These Republicans — both elected officials and private citizens — say the ugliness and vitriol that Trump supporters have displayed since the election have led them to have an overdue reckoning.

“At first I was really mad at Liz,” said Amy Edmonds, a Republican from Cheyenne who is friendly with Cheney. “I thought she was rushing it. And I thought the election wasn’t fair.”

But after she spoke with Cheney — and read the 21-page memo at the congresswoman’s insistence — Edmonds said she came to believe she was dead wrong in believing Trump’s allegations of election fraud.

“I was in some kind of fog,” she said. “I don’t know how else to describe it.”

Since her epiphany last month, Edmonds said, she has apologized to two friends she fought with who had tried to tell her that the election wasn’t rigged. And now she spends time thinking about how to engage other friends who promote false stories and disinformation about election fraud on Facebook.

She admits that she hasn’t been very persuasive so far, and finds that when she sends people articles from reliable news sources that debunk Trump’s false claims, “They’ll write back and say, ‘Well, this is mainstream media.’”

That’s a reflection of how durable Trump’s hold on Republican voters remains — and how difficult it will be for politicians like Cheney to convince Trump supporters that they have bought into “the big lie” of a stolen election, as she has privately described it to colleagues.

Cheney is, of course, in a much more difficult position than other Republicans who want their party to move past the most divisive aspects of Trump’s presidency. Her family legacy makes her, to some, an asset as a symbol of the more traditional conservative Republicanism, and the value it places on career public service, embodied by the Bushes and her father.

But that also makes her a target for Trump loyalists who reject that tradition as the very culture that Trump claimed he would root out from Washington.

Kim Small, who attended the rally at the capitol in Cheyenne last week, said of Cheney, “I honestly feel like she’s what we consider ‘the swamp.’” She said she attended the rally because she felt Cheney’s criticisms of Trump “put her at odds with the vast majority of her constituents.’’

Cheney’s allies described her as at peace with the stance she has taken on Trump. Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, one of the nine other Republicans who voted to impeach Trump, said that too many of his colleagues were doing the opposite of what Cheney is.

“They’re waiting to see if Trump collapses,” he said. “And then if he does, they’ll be like, ‘I’ve never been with Trump, ever.’” He described the effort to punish Cheney as “cancel culture on the right.”

The more difficult but ultimately meaningful path, Kinzinger said, is if Republicans signal that they don’t care about the pressure, the hostility and the possibility of political defeat.

“I’m willing to not win a reelection over this,” he said. “People need to see examples of others doing this, speaking out. And damn the consequences.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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