The Fall Of Liz Cheney

On A Truly Horrible Congresswoman

On Wednesday, Liz Cheney will be removed by the House GOP as Conference Chair and removed from her position in the leadership, demoted to the backbenches and relegated to a career of either obscurity or early retirement. These events, caused by Cheney's steadfast refusal to lie about the election, has led many liberals to make a spirited, if admittedly targeted, defense of her, on the basis that her commitment to democracy is more important than her "politics" or "political beliefs" - things that we are supposed to put at the water's edge, because this is more important.

It's a touching sentiment, designed to appeal to the heartstrings of the people who got moved by Ainsley Hayes' soliloquy near the end of an episode of The West Wing on a similar topic, but one that suffers from the grave misfortune of not being true.

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"Justice Scalia was an American hero, one of the greatest Supreme Court Justices in history."

This was part of Liz Cheney's statement after the news of Antonin Scalia's death came through in 2016. It isn't a shocking statement - arch-conservative thinks arch-conservative was good isn't revelatory, or at least shouldn't be - but it is quite the claim. One of the greatest Supreme Court Justices in history? That's got to be quite the legacy for Scalia to live up to, right? Well, let's go through a partial list of Scalia highlights (very loosely defined highlights, to be clear).

Was it Scalia's dissent in Lawrence v Texas that makes Cheney love him so much, where Scalia says that laws denying equal protection to homosexuals as a class are as permissible as laws attacking nudists as a class of people? Sticking with Scalia's homophobia, was it when Scalia said that "to defend traditional marriage is not to condemn, demean, or humiliate those who would prefer other arrangements" in his dissent in Windsor, despite the fact he says Lawrence was wrongly decided because homophobia was acceptable because of majoritarian societal morality? Or was it his banger of a dissent in Obergefell, where he referred to that case as a "judicial Putsch" that gets Liz all happy?

I mean, we know Liz - who didn't show up for her gay sister's wedding, for fuck's sake - is an ardent homophobe, but let's try some others. Was it Scalia's vote for Shelby County, which has allowed for so much of the worst excesses of racist voting rights reversals to happen? Was it his majority opinion in Heller, where he wrote "what is not debatable is that it is not the role of this Court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct" in a case about a specific handgun prohibition? Or was it Scalia's coauthored dissent in Sebelius which attempted to take apart Obamacare, and which successfully denied the mandatory nature of Medicaid expansion which has cost hundreds of thousands of Americans health care in recent years needlessly?

Liz Cheney is not guilty for her father's sins, lengthy as they are, but she is guilty of her voting record, and the behaviours and actions of people she praises. Liz Cheney is a staunch conservative ideologue who voted with Trump nearly 93% of the time, and whose voting records includes opposition to disaster relief for Puerto Rico, supporting Trump on the first impeachment, opposition to lower prescription drug prices, opposition to humanitarian standards for people claiming asylum, opposition to a $15 minimum wage, and who supported the President's ban on trans soldiers in the military. This is the woman we are supposed to find worth defending.

Of course, Liz Cheney is correct on the facts that will lead to her dismissal, because Donald Trump lost an election by legitimate means. This is undeniable, except to the majority of the House GOP who objected to the Pennsylvania electoral college votes. That fact is supposed to mean we all forget the damage she has done, and the damage done by the people she has supported and praised. Unless I missed a memo, at no time did Cheney comment on the fact that Lindsay Graham said he would never bring a Supreme Court nomination to the floor after the start of the 2020 primary cycle, only to do exactly that when Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September 2020. Oh, wait, she actually did comment on those proceedings - to express how "proud and so impressed with Judge Barrett" she had been.

Cheney is not a democrat in the small-d sense of the word, because if she was, she would have rightly viewed the contradictions of the way Scalia's seat was handled as opposed to RBG's as a source of foul play. Any spirit of honesty and truth, any speaker of reality and fact, would have to agree with that. Except … she didn't say a fucking thing, because she would like to fuck with her sister's right to get married more than she cares about democracy or equality. If she cared about a functioning democracy, she would have supported a restoration of the Voting Rights Act (she didn't) or have entered negotiations with Democrats on a new suite of voting rights legislation (she hasn't). Claiming to be pro-democracy when your ass was threatened, but not when the right to vote is stripped from millions by a coordinated campaign across years, isn't about speaking truth, but about wanting to be able to live your life in peace.

What separates Liz Cheney from the chucklefucks of treason like Hawley and Cruz is that Cheney is the product of the establishment, and she likes being liked. She is a country club conservative if I've ever seen one, and that makes her interested in the visible breaks from Trump - the ones that allow her, in theory, to continue to live her life free of scrutiny and malice. The thing about country club conservatives is that you tend to run in the circles with a lot of country club liberals, and in the past, that was fine. Cheney used to be able to survive her social illiberalism in these settings because it was a mixed audience (politically - absolutely not racially, generally) and everyone understood not to discuss politics. You could be a rich social liberal with a weekly golf game with the gay couple you've known since college and vote for Romney or McCain, and because of that, politics stayed at the water's edge. Now, you can't hide behind that facade anymore, so Cheney would find high profile, but utterly meaningless, ways to signal her opposition to the GOP's authoritarian tendencies, while voting for a legislative program and endorsing judicial nominees that would perpetuate that authoritarianism. But because court rulings and a policy of enabling the work of state legislatures is low profile, Cheney walked the line of authoritarian, racist, homophobic outcomes and that veneer of credibility. And then they attacked her territory, and she managed to find a backbone - because it finally affected her.

Nowhere in any of her public statements pre-January 6th does the words "Joe Biden won the election legitimately" (or any sort of other combination of words which mean the same thing) appear, and her problems with the planned objections to the Electoral College were based on the fact that power for election conduct rests with the States - in effect, that the reason Republicans shouldn't object is that they can't, not that they actually shouldn't. Nowhere was fidelity to the notion of speaking truth in the face of opposition when she raised questions about the conduct of elections and talked about how Democrats could potentially overturn a future election if this precedent was set. And then her workplace was attacked, and she suddenly cared about the President's actions and behaviour. Inequity and poor treatment for thee is fine, but not when it comes to me is quite the concept for a Congresswoman to be rallying around.

Liz Cheney wants us all to believe she is better than the rest of the Republican Party while making no actual effort to rally herself with the Democratic Party to advance democracy or to defeat the GOP. She knows damn well that the GOP are a party of fascism and authoritarianism, it's just that she supports those actions. Liz Cheney - unlike her father, because somehow she is even worse than her fucking Dad on this one - still opposes same sex marriage, despite a sister who won rights in Obergefell. This is a woman so uncaring about anyone else that she refused to show up to her sister's wedding, and then went on Fox News to affirm her pro-traditional marriage views to try and win a GOP primary. This is a woman willing to throw her family away for her own ambitions, and I'm supposed to praise her for putting country before party? Give me a damn break. Liz Cheney is no hero, and everyone pretending she is something she never has been and never will be - which is to say, anything other than a dangerous ideologue who makes America worse and worse - is just lying. Whether it's to themselves or their country, I don't know. What I do know is it needs to stop. Liz Cheney has never done anything to make America better, and she - and the people she reveres - make the United States worse every single day. Make it a shift exit, leave Congress, and public life, forever, for that would be the first honourable thing she's ever done.