Liz Cheney faces ouster moves in GOP Congress and in Wyoming
House GOP conference chair, Rep. Liz Cheney, is finding herself unpopular.
Her largely unfollowed-move to impeach President Trump has led to more than one move for her ouster.
On Jan. 12, she put this battle cry...
Much more will become clear in coming days and weeks, but what we know now is enough. The President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing.
and attracted all of nine GOP followers.
Maybe that's because there was a rush to judgment and President Trump wasn't responsible for the riot at the capital. There's a heckuva lot of mounting evidence -- the timeline, the character of the people busted, the failures of security, the Trump speech transcripts -- to suggest that far from this being the doing of a culpable Trump, the whole thing was a leftist put up job. Most Republicans could recognize it -- a trial without evidence is pretty much a kangaroo court. Liz, not so much.
Memo to Liz: when you wave 'charge' banner and yell to the troops to follow you someplace, and they ... don't follow, maybe you aren't a leader.
Here's what she's got going instead in her home territory of the swamp:
The Wyoming congresswoman and No. 3 leader of the House GOP caucus faces an uprising from conservative lawmakers unhappy with her yes vote to impeach President Trump.
Cheney was one of only 10 House Republicans to side with Democrats Wednesday.
Some Republicans are looking to stage an internal coup using a playbook employed during an attempted ouster of then-Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1997.
“We’ve researched the rules thoroughly and there has been a lot of discussion on how to handle this,” Montana Rep. Matt Rosendale told Newsmax. Cheney ”is out of step with the conference in such a monumental way.”
It looks even worse back at her nominal home of Wyoming:
CHEYENNE — The Wyoming Republican Party issued a statement highlighting an outpouring of opposition from its members in response to U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., voting to impeach President Donald Trump on Wednesday for his role in the U.S. Capitol riot that occurred a week earlier.
The party issued the statement late Wednesday night, a few hours after Cheney joined nine other Republican representatives in voting to impeach Trump for his role in inciting the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, making him the first president to be impeached twice.
“The wind in Wyoming has been horrendous today – with gusts up to 65 miles per hour,” the statement begins. “That is nothing compared to the whirlwind created by Representative Cheney’s announcement that she would be voting to impeach President Trump and her subsequent follow-through of doing just that.
“There has not been a time during our tenure when we have seen this type of an outcry from our fellow Republicans, with the anger and frustration being palpable in the comments we have received. Our telephone has not stopped ringing, our email is filling up, and our website has seen more traffic than at any previous time,” the statement continues. “The consensus is clear that those who are reaching out to the Party vehemently disagree with Representative Cheney’s decision and actions.”
Cheney defended Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman and former Ukraine Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, two witnesses in Trump’s first impeachment, after he attacked them. She criticized the president’s proposal to draw down troops in Germany and rebuked him for dismissing reports that Russia had offered Afghan militants a bounty to kill U.S. troops.She defended infectious disease expert Anthony Fauci when others on the right attacked his prescription for dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic and responded to Trump’s cavalier attitude by tweeting out a photo of her father in a mask with the caption, “Dick Cheney says WEAR A MASK.” More cutting still was the hashtag: #realmenwearmasks.