The House Republican leadership removed Rep. Liz Cheney on Wednesday and it is more significant as a political gesture in favor of Trumpism than it is for the concrete step of removing a third-ranking representative in the party’s legislative leadership hierarchy.
Since the 1970s, Chennys have been there, let it be Liz or her father Dick, either near or at the top of the leadership of Republicans.
No more.
Dick Cheney began his career as an intern in Richard Nixon’s White House and Gerald Ford made him the Chief of Staff for White House.
He advanced through the ranks of Congress to become Republican conference chair – the same position his daughter recently lost – and minority leader during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, and later served as Secretary of Defense under President George H.W. Bush. After eight years outside in Bill Clinton’s eight years tenure, Dick Cheney served as Vice President under George W. Bush for eight years, after which Liz continued serving at the State Department.
One year after Liz got elected to Congress, she joined the Republican leadership at the end of the Obama presidency.
Although Donald Trump’s victory was a rebuke to past Republican administrations, Cheney’s removal demonstrates that the party has passed away from the beacon-of-freedom values that honored the party for many decades. The Republican Party preached socialism as gospel in language though falling well short in practise.
Cheney alluded to the lineage in her defiant remarks on the House floor Tuesday night.
She said that Republicans, as Reagan’s party, fought for liberty, waged the Cold War, and beat the Soviet Communists. America is on the verge of another possible Cold War at the moment, this time with communist China. Attacks on our political processes and law in order encourage our enemies and feed Communist misinformation about the collapse of American democracy. She said that we have an obligation to tell the facts. She asserted that the referendum was not rigged, nor has America lost.
Her warning to the leadership of Republicans is well worth reading in its entirety. She has been booted from the top of the party for declining to promote the fabricated fact that Trump won the presidency.
It’s difficult to be, as Reagan put it in his inaugural speech, a light of hope for those who now cease to have freedom, while the party is committed to overturning the outcome of a fair and free election.
It is absolutely unlikely to be the beacon as Republicans in Arizona have hidden some of the state’s 2020 votes behind closed doors, searching for non-existent fraud and building a democratic circus.
