Yesterday’s vote to remove Liz Cheney from House GOP leadership has been framed by much of the pundit class as punishment for her hostility toward Donald Trump and evidence that Republicans no longer tolerate any dissent on this issue.
However, as Terry Schilling, president of American Principles Project, argues in Townhall this morning, this simplistic narrative entirely ignores the primary reason Republicans turned on Cheney: she was appallingly bad at her job.
…She disdains her constituents—the very people she is supposed to represent and defend. She is monomaniacally set on endlessly re-litigating her conspiracy theories about the previous administration. Rather than defend her party, its values, or its message, Cheney jumps at the chance to repeat any story or argument meant to discredit the conservative movement, including false ones, in a vain effort to prove that she “isn’t one of those Republicans.”
For example, one of Cheney’s duties is to protect the Republican Party from attacks. When two-thirds of her colleagues in the House, and some of the GOP’s most prominent figures in the Senate, responded to the desires of their constituents by objecting to the Electoral College certification, Cheney rushed to the media to join the left-wing chorus condemning them in the strongest language. She has declared their objections to be ipso facto disqualifying behavior, should any of them ever choose to run for president. And she still routinely likens their desire to scrutinize our new voting regime, which was implemented midstream and removed safeguards, to Nazi propaganda.
Another of Cheney’s duties is to lead the Republican Party on messaging. But her clouded judgment when it comes to anything remotely related to Trump leads her, more often than not, to parrot the mainstream media’s every smear. She reflexively follows the Left in painting the rioters and the idle trespassers alike of January 6 as white supremacist insurrectionists. She practically tripped over herself to publicize the now-debunked story of Russian bounties on U.S. soldiers, in the belief that it would slime Trump.
You can read Terry Schilling’s full op-ed here.
