Wyoming

You have to wonder what Liz Cheney feels her relationship to the Republican Party to be today. Having spent years denouncing Donald Trump as a faux Republican and a disgrace to the party, much of the past year implicitly accusing him of treason as vice-chair of the January 6 Committee and the two months since her defeat in the Wyoming primary characterizing half (at least) of the GOP as “very sick,” she is co-sponsoring a bill with Representative Zoe Lofgren, a California Democrat, to reform the Electoral Count Act in order to “protect the rule of law and ensure that future efforts to attack the integrity of presidential elections can’t succeed.” Representative Lofgren was one of seven impeachment managers in President Trump’s trial for his first impeachment in 2020.

I was hoping that I wouldn’t have to write about Liz Cheney again. After she was crushed by the Trump-endorsed Harriet Hageman last week in the Wyoming GOP primary, I figured the self-obsessed crusader would retreat to her boudoir to dress up in top hats once worn by Abraham Lincoln while guzzling a brand of whiskey favored by Ulysses S. Grant, both of whom she invoked in her petulent non-concession concession speech. But Cheney is not quite done making a spectacle of herself. A couple of weeks ago, the Trump-deranged congresswoman sniffed that she would find it “very difficult” to support Ron DeSantis because he had aligned himself with Donald Trump. That remark garnered some portion of the contempt it deserved, but it was nothing to her latest foray on to the public stage.

Liz Cheney made two interesting moves last week. One, she was among the fourteen House Republican who voted to pass the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act that her Wyoming colleagues in the Senate, John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis, refused to support. Two, she offered publicly to instruct her Democratic constituents in the state of Wyoming how to register to vote in the Republican primary election on August 16, thus allowing them to support her against Harriet Hageman, her Trump-endorsed opponent. For decades Wyoming Democrats have taken advantage of the Wyoming Republican Party’s idiotic policy of allowing cross-over voting in the primaries, thus virtually guaranteeing that the most conservative candidate will be eliminated at the beginning of any electoral proceeding.

Cockburn is eagerly anticipating a number of clashes in the 2022 midterm elections in under a year's time. Chief among them is the battle Congresswoman Liz Cheney faces with Trump-backed challenger Harriet Hageman to hold onto Wyoming's sole seat in the House of Representatives. So how is the incumbent presenting herself to her voters? Cheney has sought to bolster her reputation as "the Last Honest Republican in Washington," by periodically challenging former president Donald Trump in TV appearances with NBC, CBS and Fox News's friendlier faces — Bret Baier and freshly departed Sunday host Chris Wallace. But most significantly, she has raised her national profile through her role as vice chair of the January 6 committee, upon which she and Adam Kinzinger are the only two Republicans.

Last weekend, the Wyoming GOP Central Committee voted not to recognize Liz Cheney as a member of the Republican Party by a margin of 31-29, a vote that was much closer than those taken in some county committees, a number of which made the unanimous decision to disavow her. The action does nothing to reduce Cheney’s power and position as Wyoming’s sole congressional representative, and in any case it seems increasing likely that the lady no longer cares what her constituency Way out West thinks of her. Last weekend Cheney, together with Representative Jim Clyburn, the House Majority Whip, and Chris Wallace of Fox News, each accepted a Jefferson-Lincoln Award bestowed by the Panetta Institute for Public Policy on Dr. Wallace’s Sunday show.

Cowboy State Daily reports that Liz Cheney’s House campaign has so far hauled in $5 million in donations this year, some millions more than in Cheney’s previous run to keep her seat in 2020. According to CSD, 6 percent of itemized individual donations were made by people listing Wyoming addresses, compared with nearly 27 percent in the previous cycle. Since Wyomingites have so far contributed nearly $177,000 so far this year to Cheney, as compared with $134,850 at the same point in the campaign as a year ago, it seems that either past Republican donors in the state are giving more, or that anti-Trump Democrats are contributing this time round, or both.

Last Wednesday, Rep. Liz Cheney seized the opportunity during a House Armed Services Committee hearing to apologize to Gen. Mark Milley. She went on to assail the 'despicable' questioning of her Republican colleagues, who wanted information about phone calls Milley had made to a Chinese official last fall, in which the general had assured him that, were President Trump to launch a nuclear attack against China (presumably out of sheer frustration, or perhaps idle curiosity to learn what the result would be), he would tip him ahead of the fact. This, of course, was a direct affront to the 70 percent of Wyoming citizens for had voted for Trump in 2020. Several days before that, Cheney had confessed to 60 Minutes that she had been wrong to oppose gay marriage in the past.

Kemmerer, Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney has the political brain of a sucked egg, as her egregiously self-destructive decision to join her Democratic colleagues in voting to impeach President Trump following the events at the US Capitol on January 6 showed. In terms of personability and charm, Cheney is the Republican equivalent of Hillary Clinton. And in a state with a population of 581,024 people spread across 97,914 square miles where politics has always been something like a family affair, she is very much an outsider, even a stranger. Born in Madison, Wisconsin, she lived in the Cowboy State for only a year or so when she was a sixth- and seventh-grade student in the 1970s.

Liz Cheney is bad for the Republican party, which is why the pro-Democratic media is so obsessed with her. What the pundits won’t openly admit is that the Wyoming representative is their last hope at distracting Americans from the Biden administration’s mushrooming disasters. Meanwhile, Speaker Pelosi is heaping praise on ‘Lynne’ Cheney — a pretty solid sign that the Democrats are trying to exploit the House Republican Conference Chair. David Axelrod, the former Obama adviser, insists that Cheney is ‘as conservative as they come’, which should arouse the suspicions of any real conservative. A headline in the New York Times reads, ‘House Republicans Have Had Enough of Liz Cheney’s Truth-Telling’. Rep.

There have been darker days for the House of Cheney. In 2008, Vice President Dick Cheney left office amidst two imprudent wars and a capsizing economy. A decade on, the times are surprisingly kind to a family once among the most controversial in American politics. Dick’s daughter, Rep. Liz Cheney, is looking at a Senate run. ‘She’s got pretty good foreign policy, national security chops,’ Sen. John Cornyn of Texas said unironically earlier this month. ‘She’d be a great addition.