After a two-month hiatus from public view, the January 6 Committee will soon conduct its ninth televised public hearing. Sitting centre stage will be Liz Cheney, vice chair and the most prominent Republican critic of Donald Trump.
Cheney might once have been a frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. Her connections and talent are testament to that. The daughter of Dick Cheney — former White House chief of staff, congressman, secretary of defence and vice-president — she was steeped in Washington politics from childhood.
Elected in 2016 to her father’s old seat in Congress, she also followed in his footsteps with her appointment as chair of the House Republican Conference. This made her the third most senior Republican in the US House of Representatives. That she secured this post after just one term signalled both her authority and her future prospects.
Those heady days must seem a distant memory. Having stood against Trump’s attempted coup, then voting to impeach him for inciting the insurrection, Cheney’s immediate political career lies in ruins.
In May 2021, she was ousted from her party leadership role as punishment for betraying Trump. Last month she lost her primary in a 66%-29% rout to her Trump-backed opponent, which means she will leave Congress on January 3. Two years ago she won the same ballot by 73%-26%, a 47-point landslide.
After her defeat, pundits have speculated that she might run for president in 2024, either challenging Trump or his successors for the Republican nomination, or running as an independent. Neither is likely.
As her primary result shows, her internal party support has evaporated. Wyoming Republicans didn’t reject Cheney because they disagreed with her on policy. She is a rock-ribbed conservative in her father’s image who supported Trump’s agenda to the hilt in Congress. She backed his $2 trillion tax cuts for the rich. She supported his border wall. She approved easier access to guns. She opposed a carbon tax. She voted for his policies 93% of the time, more than Trump acolytes such as Mark Meadows, Jim Jordan and Mo Brooks. More often too than Elise Stefanik, the woman who replaced her in the House GOP leadership.
Moreover, she has voted against every major Biden administration initiative, including the American rescue plan to provide COVID relief, the For the People Act to enhance voting rights, the Equality Act to prohibit sexual discrimination, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act to bolster American infrastructure, and the Inflation Reduction Act to address climate change, impose a 15% minimum corporate tax on large companies, and lower prescription drug costs. Republicans have no quarrel with her policy record.
She lost because she acknowledged the truth of Trump’s actions to subvert democracy, and upheld her oath to “support and defend the constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic”. That resolve has made her an outcast in today’s Republican Party.
Republican voters want what Trump is selling. That’s why he still holds sway, in spite of all his crimes and abuses. They like the sexism, and the racism, and the homophobia. They welcome the threats and the violence. They embrace his lies. They don’t want compromise and they don’t care what it takes to retain power. Cheney’s adherence to the constitution and basic principles of democracy are anathema to them.
Establishment Republicans long flirted with far-right extremists at the party’s margins, from McCarthyites, Birchers and Goldwater groupies, to evangelical absolutists, Tea Party radicals, and QAnon conspiracists. Violent militia movements were tolerated in the shadows. Then Trump came along and fused them into his MAGA movement, and now the fringe virus has overtaken its host. This militant vanguard intends to burn American democracy to the ground and impose a Christo-fascist theocracy.
An independent Cheney candidacy is also unlikely. It would be a burn-the-boats decision, doomed to fail. She knows she couldn’t possibly win. It would also mean permanent exile from the GOP. As long as Cheney harbours hope that the Republican Party can be salvaged, she won’t close that door. She understands the entrenched advantages of the two dominant parties. Since Abraham Lincoln’s election in 1860, only Republican and Democratic nominees have won the White House.
Independents have a long history of coming up short. Ross Perot, the idiosyncratic Texan billionaire, tried twice in the 1990s. He received millions of votes both times but didn’t carry a single state.
John Anderson, a Republican congressman who had also served as chair of the House Republican Conference, ran as an independent against Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan in 1980. He finished a distant third, with 6.6% of the vote but no electoral college votes.
Teddy Roosevelt, who ran in 1912 under the Bull Moose banner, was the only candidate since Reconstruction to outpoll either of the two major party nominees. Yet despite his charisma and status as a popular former president, he couldn’t overcome the electorate’s resistance to change.
Cheney’s only chance is for the current incarnation of the Republican Party to be repudiated at the ballot box for several election cycles. Until voters make it clear that extremism will consign the GOP to permanent opposition, conventional conservatives have no path to regain control of their party.
Nonetheless, speculation will continue. Cheney knows how to hold the spotlight. In her concession speech last month, she declared that “now the real work begins”, and said she would do “whatever it takes” to prevent Trump returning to the Oval Office. She has transferred her remaining campaign funds — $7.5 million — into a leadership PAC named The Great Task, an homage to Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Leadership PACs are used to raise politicians’ profiles and support political allies.
With her PAC, and her personal wealth somewhere between $10 and $48 million, Cheney won’t have to look for a job. She may join a corporate board or two. She might give some lectures or take up a think tank post. She could return to her base in Virginia and seek to springboard back into public office from there. But her primary mission will be to marshal resistance within the GOP against the MAGA forces, using her networks and her pulpit to wage war on them.
It will be a long battle. Cheney appears determined to fight.
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