Almost everything U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) said Sunday on Meet the Press was on target, as are most things she says in general. Unfortunately, Cheney also leaves unsaid plenty that she really ought not to ignore.
By now, few Americans are unaware that Cheney is almost alone on a political island as one of the only prominent Republicans to full-throatedly both condemn former President Donald Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election and hold to account the Capitol rioters and fellow travelers. She is right, and courageous, to do so.
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She was right to say that the House committee looking into the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol incursion has revealed plenty of new information quite useful both for understanding why and how the riot happened and how officials can keep such idiocy from occurring again. And, with the committee’s letter explaining its debatable decision to subpoena Trump, she was right Sunday to say, “The committee made a great effort to lay out in the letter itself the specific information we’ve already gathered about Donald Trump’s personal and direct role in managing and overseeing and coordinating the sophisticated, multi-part plan to overturn the election.”
The attempt to steal the election was abominable. The rioters’ attempt to stop the crucial civic ceremony of counting electoral votes while targeting Vice President Mike Pence and Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) for execution was worse than abominable. It is a permanent stain on the records of countless Republican officials that they not only won’t say so but actually spread the lie about election theft that undergirded those abominations.
Cheney’s mistake, though, is in her mono-focus on that issue to the exclusion of all else. She would be a far more effective political advocate — better at actually gaining agreement from persuadable Republicans and independents — if she would also buttress her conservative bona fides by calling out the manifold abuses of today’s leading Democrats.
Cheney should start by actually holding Democrats to account for their errors surrounding Jan. 6. While it is absolutely false to say, as many right-wingers mistakenly claim, that Speaker Pelosi rejected offers to beef up Capitol security leading up to Jan. 6, it is true that Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser asked for only a light National Guard presence for the day and insisted that the Guard not be armed. It is also true that a dozen of her Democratic colleagues wrongly objected to earlier presidential vote certifications, and true that the Democratic Party at all levels fights reasonable ballot-integrity measures while cynically lying that Republicans are engaged in “voter suppression.”
If Cheney wants truth to reign and for elections to have integrity, she should call out misdeeds by both sides and put them in an appropriate context.
Meanwhile, there are plenty of other threats to the constitutional order that are emanating from the lawless Biden administration. His Justice Department and FBI are running amuck in myriad ways to target Republicans and conservatives with abusive arrests and outlandish subpoenas while helping cover up Biden family transgressions. Biden issues executive orders while knowing they are illegal, and deliberately welcomes rampant illegal crossings and unsupervised release of illegals throughout the nation — exacerbating crime and a fentanyl epidemic in the process.
Cheney should walk and chew gum simultaneously. If she were an equal-opportunity critic, she could still insist that Trump-world election deniers are a uniquely grave threat to the republic, without being automatically dismissed by otherwise persuadable Republicans as a one-trick pony.
For nearly two years, Liz Cheney has been a light in the darkness. She errs, though, in giving the impression that the darkness exists on only one political side.