But that doesn’t diminish the rightness of what she’s doing. Nor does it undercut how unusually independent-minded she is. To wit: She’s not only isolated within the Republican Party. She’s also unlike many other Never Trumpers, whose revulsion at Republicans’ coddling of the former president has led them to insult and attack the party on all sorts of fronts and effectively turned them into provisional, situational Democrats. Cheney, in contrast, votes with the party, holding tight and proudly to her conservative bona fides.
Don’t take it from me. Take it from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, the wackadoodle Georgia Republican. “Let me remind everyone, while Democrats are being fooled by Liz Cheney right now, they should remember that she is not a Democrat,” Greene said in January on Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast. “As a matter of fact, she has a very conservative voting record — more conservative than some of my Republican colleagues.”
Greene was prompted by reports that Democrats in Wyoming might cross over into the Republican primary to back Cheney, and she added: “Democrats, while you think it’s fun because Liz Cheney is totally dishing on Trump and trying to do everything she can to destroy us and Trump and Ivanka now and all these people, you’re getting tricked. So while you’re going to go vote for her in the Republican primary in Wyoming, you’re voting for a snake that’s going to bite you, too.”
Such venom! And such bunk, inasmuch as Cheney openly disagrees with Democrats about sweeping voting reforms, disagrees with Democrats about the size of Biden’s Build Back Better agenda, disagrees with Democrats about abortion. She has made only limited cause with them. She’s clear about that — and about her passion for that cause, which is to hold Trump accountable once and for all.
I’d say she’s a woman without a country, except she has this country — our country — foremost in her thoughts. She knows what makes it special, and she recognizes what her Republican colleagues in Congress choose to ignore, which is that the “sacred obligation to defend the peaceful transfer of power has been honored by every American president — except one,” as she observed when she received a 2022 Profile in Courage Award from the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation in Boston in April.
“The question for every one of us is, in this time of testing, will we do our duty?” she said, articulating the stakes in a precise and irrefutable manner that will surely stand the test of time. “Or will we look away from danger, ignore the threat, embrace the lies?”
Read More: Opinion | Liz Cheney Will Not Tolerate Trump’s Lies