On Wednesday, House Republicans voted to remove Liz Cheney from her position as Conference Chair, the no. 3 position in House Republican Leadership. On Friday morning, she was replaced by Elise Stefanik, once the youngest woman elected to Congress, a moderate and onetime Trump skeptic, now an aggressive Trump defender. Stefanik was endorsed by Kevin McCarthy and Donald Trump, and was elected overwhelmingly over conservative challenger Chip Roy.1 Cheney was removed for, as Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy put it, “relitigating the past” and causing “internal divisions.”2
Liz Cheney is completely right about the 2020 election (free and fair), Donald Trump’s conduct on January 6th (reprehensible), the danger of a Trump 2024 bid (very real), her impeachment vote (justified) and virtually everything else she has spoken about publicly since November’s election. When it comes to serving in House Republican leadership, none of that matters.
Cheney’s ouster has nothing to do with ideology. Liz Cheney had a Heritage Action3 score of 98%, and Chip Roy (the conservative challenger to Elise Stefanik in the race to replace Cheney) had a lifetime rating of 96%. Elise Stefanik, the handpicked choice of Kevin McCarthy and Donald Trump? A measly 48%. She even voted against Trump’s only major legislative accomplishment, the 2017 tax reform bill!
In the before-times, that would make Stefanik a “RINO moderate squish” to large swaths of the base, and render her virtually unelectable for party leadership. Now that Trump is “the establishment,” voting to throw out Pennsylvania’s electoral votes and endorsing the utterly farcical bamboo recall in Arizona (see below) more than makes up for any policy heresies - even ones that went against Trump! You either need to bend the knee and pay lip-service to Trump and his self-defeating voter fraud delusions, or find a new gig.
Josh Holmes, longtime Mitch McConnell advisor and co-host of Ruthless podcast (essential listening for any Republican or conservative), knows a thing or two about the give and take that comes with serving in Congressional leadership. On last Thursday’s episode of Ruthless, he provided this maxim of what being a member of Congressional leadership means: “You have to always make your colleagues job easier than it would be without you.” To paraphrase Holmes, the most important question when determining a good leader is “Are they providing a “heat shield,” or are they making things more difficult?”
I have a degree of sympathy for this argument. I have long defended Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan and John Boehner when they had to take positions for the good of the conference, even if it wasn’t their own personal ideological preference. To an extent, becoming a member of leadership means subsuming some of your own identity into what is best for the conference - and especially for members in competitive districts. It’d be hypocritical for me to take the opposite position when someone I like takes a position against the perceived good of the conference, even if her position is objectively correct. This isn’t The West Wing.
As Holmes said in that same podcast, “[Cheney’s ouster] doesn’t have a damn thing to do with Donald Trump. This has to do with leadership politics, plain and simple.” That is true, from a certain point of view. Liz Cheney without a doubt made things difficult for her fellow House Republicans. The role of Conference Chair is to coordinate messaging for the House Republican Conference. It is difficult to do this job effectively when one’s message is completely out of step with the conference’s on-the-record messaging.4 And right now, the conference wants to talk about Biden, not about January 6th.
As more time has passed since January 6 and impeachment, even the 16 other Republicans who voted to impeach have tried to “move on,” leaving Liz Cheney standing virtually alone. Her stance put her on an island, which made her leadership position increasingly untenable. Her survival path was clear, to paraphrase Holmes once again: “Let it go, stay out of media trap and don’t make that political mistake.”
Holmes is right. Cheney’s steadfast refusal to downplay Trump’s conduct on January 6th was a political mistake. I think she knows this. She just doesn’t seem to care. It’s important to note that Trump himself hasn’t “let it go.” He still spends more time bashing fellow Republicans perceived as “disloyal” and sticking to his stolen election nonsense than attacking Democrats, not at all dissimilar to his conduct while running for and serving as President. The grassroots hasn’t moved on either - a pack of nutcases in Arizona are currently in the middle of their fourth recount of Arizona’s votes in a quixotic quest to prove Donald Trump lost Arizona due to fraud, not sheer political malpractice.5 But again, only Cheney is expected to “let it go.”6
Thanks to Trump’s repeated lies about the election, a large contingent of Congressional Republicans who backed him up or said nothing, justified suspicions about election integrity and a true Idiot’s Array of outside agitators, the vast majority of Republican voters and grassroots activists are wrongly convinced the 2020 election was stolen. That horse left the barn and its not coming back. It’s left to House Republicans to adjust their leadership team to fit this alternate reality. So yes, if you want to sum that up as “leadership politics, plain and simple” you could, I suppose.
This being said, the sacking of the third-ranking member of the minority party of the House of Representatives isn’t even close to the most important event to happen this week, though you could be forgiven for thinking differently if you’ve tuned into the cable networks. The night after her ouster, CNN devoted a considerable amount of its prime-time coverage to the fall of Liz Cheney, with comparatively little time spent on the Colonial gas pipeline hack, the two major economic forecast misses (less job growth and more inflation than was expected), the continuing mess at the border, the escalating Israel-Hamas conflict, or the British local elections.
Legacy media loves to fixate on the “Republican civil war” narrative, especially when Democrats are having as bad a week as this week has been. The Republican civil war narrative is overhyped. There is no civil war. Anyone who isn’t willing to say on the record that they support Donald Trump (and that’s it) isn’t on the team. Those who aren’t have either left the party, lost reelection, retired, been marginalized or found new and more rewarding careers.
I expect Cheney will parlay this into a 2024 presidential bid, regardless of her denial on Fox News.7 In a Trump-less field, I think a Cheney candidacy would do only slightly better than Lindsay Graham’s.8 Should Trump run again, however, I think Cheney’s public defenestration, the “strange new respect” she’s earned from the media, sterling conservative record, family name and fundraising would make a Cheney 2024 bid plausible as the chief opposition candidate to Trump.
None of the other remaining anti-Trump or Trump-skeptical Republicans have that combination of factors supporting a potential candidacy, and should Trump run again I would expect most Republicans who’ve made their careers by supporting him to stay out, clearing the field for Trump and, in effect, Cheney. I’d expect Trump would win handily, but I also think Cheney wouldn’t necessarily run to win, but rather to damage him before the general election. That would be a victory in and of itself.
Liz Cheney is gone because the grassroots and the donors wanted her gone. Do “normie” voters care? Probably not. But the people who have members of Congress’s ears and control their finances care. We can’t expect the widespread belief in a stolen election that has consumed the Republican grassroots to not permeate our elected officials.9 This is democracy, after all. Republican officeholders, like all politicians, exist downstream of their voters.
Cheney’s fall will have absolutely zero impact on the 2022 midterms. Aside from political obsessives, most Americans probably don’t even know this tempest in a teapot even happened. Republicans are the heavy favorites to take back the House, no matter who their no. 3 ranking official is. Even still, I think it’s illustrative of where the Republican Party is right now. After her downfall, House GOP leadership will be facially more unified going into 2022, though they may find they would’ve prefered Cheney inside the tent pissing out rather than outside the tent pissing in. Likewise, Cheney will walk away from this with a larger national profile, well-deserved credit for sticking to her principles even when it cost her her job, and a plausible path to run for president that did not exist before.
For the time being, everybody benefits from Cheney’s fall. Though, if I was Kevin McCarthy, I’d avoid posing under any “Mission Accomplished” banners anytime soon. He may have won this battle, but like Obi-Wan Kenobi, striking down Liz Cheney may only make her more powerful than he could possibly imagine.
Trump threatened a primary challenge to Roy, a former chief of staff for Sen. Ted Cruz, for going against Stefanik and because Roy did not vote to overturn the election. Not the first time conservatives have been targeted for going against the party establishment.
In the same letter he professed that the GOP is a “big tent party” that “embrace[s] free thought and debate.” Sure.
A leading conservative outside group that rates how Republicans vote on “key votes.” A low Heritage Action score has helped doom incumbents in the past.
Of course, many House Republicans are perfectly willing to say off-the-record exactly what Cheney says on-the-record. That is, of course, the entire problem.
Frequently and gratuitously attacking Arizona political icon John McCain in deeply personal terms, even after his death, almost certainly contributed more to Trump’s narrow Arizona loss than fictional ballots tainted with bamboo shipped in from Asia. Seriously, you can’t make this sh*t up.
Only Cheney’s fate is within the control of the House Republican Conference. They can’t do anything about Trump or the grassroots, even if they wanted to (which they don’t).
“I’m not running for president” does not mean she won’t run for president in 2024. It just literally means she’s not currently running for president at this very moment.
Graham’s candidacy went nowhere and he didn’t even make it to the first primary.
Especially when said elected officials actively stoke that falsehood.