Coop Scoop: Defenestrating Liz Cheney
The GOP Jumps The Shark
May 12, 2021
Issue #74
It’s been amusing to read the plethora of social media posts from liberals who are straining to distance themselves in every way from the now defenestrated Liz Cheney.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. One declaration after another, mostly saying how she cannot be “supported” because of the right-wing policies she holds not to speak of those of the greater Cheney Dynasty, as if voicing your simple opinion on Facebook constitutes material aid or denial thereof.
Really? My friends, nobody cares if you do or do not “support” Liz Cheney because the political action around her has got no connection whatsoever to liberals posting on social media. Got it?
It is funny though to watch the now de rigeur ideological babysitters on the left trying to define who may be allowed to be an actual dissident in the Republican Party and who is not. How about you just let them sort it out? Better, take what you can get!
Cheney is a hard right pol who happens to believe, at least now, that constitutional rule is preferred over authoritarian rule. That’s good.Because the biggest single issue we face in the immediate term is defense of the democratic order against the authoritarians now occupying half of Congress. You will probably disagree with this or you have never posed the question, but I think that if you dream of some sort of progressive American government, that administration would absolutely allow for the free exercise of political rights by the constitutional right, of the Cheney variety.
That is, unless you conjure up some future in which mainstream Republicans would be outlawed and I guess that would make YOU an authoritarian!
In this context, I am heartened by what Cheney is doing. Whether she got here by mistake or not (I think not) she has positioned herself rather well for the medium and long run.
We need to acknowledge that her speaking out, her simple refusal to accept the Big Lie, and her willingness to continue to beat that drum, has forced the Republican Party to disrobe itself in public and it’s not a pretty sight.
May 12, 2021 might be recorded in history as one of those “hinge dates.” Much more than a simple and cliched “inflection point.”
This is the day on which the Grand Old Party has officially cast itself as the principle and seditious carrier of that Big Lie and has shown the world that it has little to no interest in democracy. Promoting Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Green while canning Liz Cheney reveals a deeply perverse party detached from all rational political activity,
Some will argue that Republicans have always been this way. Some have, of course. But the party as a whole itself has never before taken such a radical and dangerous turn as the current deep dive into explicit anti-democratic politics.
Another issue we must have clear. Trump did not create Trump voters. They did not fall from Mars. The voters created Trump. And it is the Republican base that is the vanguard of this anti-democratic movement that Trump has put himself in front of and to which the congressional Quislings are absolutely loyal.
So, as you have long ago figured out, about a third of the country or more have no interest in any serious “issues” right down to and including their own survival in a pandemic. Their overwhelming concern is “election security” i.e. insisting the 2020 election was stolen by liberals, the deep state and probably some Jews.
Trump has lost about 15% or so of his support and recent internal Republican polling finds him lurking in the mid-30’s in most battleground hotspots. But his base is still there and it’s enough to look at the Circus of Crazy in the Arizona “audit” to see this slice of the people have pretty much descended into madness.
Perhaps the most immediate benefit of the Cheney purge will be increased scrutiny of January 6. Indeed, she was purged not just because Trump wanted her out, but so did McCarthy and the rest of the Republican leadership because they are terrified of the sort of investigative commission that Cheney (and the Democrats) are supporting and what damning details it would reveal regarding the GOP/Neo-Fascist connections. Writing on the Never Trump site, The Bulwark, former Bush admin official Amanda Carpenter lays it out:
“Once Cheney is loose from the grips of leadership, there is nothing to stop her from working with the Democrats to pursue the January 6 commission, something she said in a Washington Postop-ed is one of her chief goals… Many Republicans, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy who refuses to reveal the entire contents of his conversations with Trump that day, have tried to expand the potential scope of the commission to include all forms of political violence. Cheney insists on a sharp focus on January 6.
Since Democrats control both houses of Congress, and such a commission could probably be included in a 50-vote threshold reconciliation bill, there is no reason to think Cheney will not be successful.
As members of Congress would not be permitted to participate in the commission under Cheney’s design, Democrats would do well to work with Cheney to organize competent Republicans to serve on it. There’s no shortage of former GOP officials with impressive investigative legal, and analytical expertise who could be trusted with the task.”
That brings us to the second possible benefit of the Cheney Purge. Some one hundred top Republicans including some elected officials issued a manifesto this week calling on the GOP to radically alter course back to rationality or face the emergence of a third party.
It seems clear that Cheney has now won the position of Anti-Trump and will emerge as a sort of organizational pole of opposition, leading right into the midterms and into the 2024 primaries.
Those of us who are not Republicans should view this favorably as Cheney is clearly determined to continue torturing Trump and further embarrassing the pack of cronies around McCarthy. She will be continuing to further pry open all the cracks in the Republican Party and that is downright encouraging.
Yes, Cheney has her own agenda. She has skillfully and quickly become the leading alternative to Trump. And though she is currently in a small minority, her bet is that Republicans will crash in the midterms and if they do, she just might be the last woman standing. My question: Would you rather negotiate with her or with Jim Jordan?
That brings me to the surreal images we saw Wednesday morning. Just minutes after dropping the blade on Cheney, with the blood still fresh, McCarthy (and the rest of the Big Four) then met with Joe Biden to discuss, Oh God, a bipartisan approach to infrastructure.
Biden is going the extra mile to appease his co-president Joe Manchin by showing he really wants Republican buy in… but this anti-democratic crew has already announced their intention to block everything and anything coming from the White House. and we can hope that Biden is, in fact, just pandering to Manchin temporarily and does not really believe the Republicans are going to give him anything. Because they are not.
The next few months are gonna be a bear. Yes, we have turned the corner on the pandemic, but we are now facing an immediate existential political crisis as we move toward the midterms. More than 350 voter suppression bills lurk in 47 states. A big chunk of the population has given up on democracy. The Democratic Party itself is bending perilously in on itself as it presses for major reform. Progressives are busy talking about their skin color and their genitals instead of talking to unaligned or even Trump voters who can be won over. It’s not a great moment.
Personally, I do not “support” or “oppose” Liz Cheney. I simply welcome her dissidence and admire her resolve. +++
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