Byron York’s Daily Memo: Why House Republicans have had it with Liz Cheney

Twelve days earlier, on January 13, Newhouse voted to impeach President Donald Trump. Newhouse, who had gotten word in December that he would likely be selected for the whip team, stayed on as planned after the impeachment vote.

So much for ruthless Republican punishment of GOP lawmakers who voted to impeach Trump. The Newhouse experience — and that of other Republicans who voted to impeach and were not punished or exiled — sheds light on the current brouhaha over House Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney. Cheney’s problem is not that she voted to impeach Trump. It is that she can’t move on from voting to impeach Trump.

House GOP sources believe Republicans will vote to oust Cheney from her leadership position next Wednesday, at the party’s conference meeting. It’s possible Cheney’s likely replacement, Representative Elise Stefanik, could be elected to succeed her at the same time, although that might happen later.

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If Cheney’s time in the leadership is about to end, what did her in? It has to do with her insistence on replaying the Trump impeachment and the Capitol riot rather than focusing on the tasks that confront Republicans today, like opposing a multi-trillion-dollar Biden agenda through which Democrats seek to “remake” the United States.

Cheney began to rankle some of her Republican colleagues on January 12, the eve of impeachment, when she issued a press release announcing she would vote to impeach Trump. “There has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution,” Cheney said. The press release was immediately taken up by Democrats, who threw it back at Republicans, saying that even GOP leaders supported impeaching Trump. To this day, some Republicans complain that Cheney’s words were used to “bludgeon” them. Why couldn’t she just have voted for impeachment without the grandstanding?

But even if other Republicans were angry with Cheney about her vote, they took no action against her. Today, they point out that if Cheney’s current problems were about what she did in January, she could have been removed months ago. Instead, Cheney continued on as a member of the House GOP leadership.

But she couldn’t seem to stop talking about Trump. And, of course, many in the media loved asking her about the former president, which led to a flood of “divided GOP” stories. At this point, nearly four months after the impeachment vote, Cheney could have developed a stock answer for the inevitable media inquiries: I voted to impeach. I explained my vote. I stand by it. But now it is time to move on to the pressing issue of opposing the Biden-Pelosi agenda and winning back the House in 2022. Instead, Cheney has seemed to relish fanning the flames.

“It came to a boiling point a week and a half ago at our retreat [in Florida] when she’s doing a press conference and she’s still talking about January 6 and Donald Trump when we’re all talking about unifying to defeat Pelosi’s socialist agenda and win the House back,” said one Republican. “At that point it became clear she’s just not interested in working with the rest of us on a shared goal.” Rank-and-file members can do whatever they want, Republicans say, but members of the leadership should at least publicly be on the same page.

“That’s where the problem lies — not with her vote,” added a senior GOP aide. “None of the other members who took that vote [to impeach Trump] have been stripped of committees or their status on the whip team.” For example, one of those who voted to impeach, Representative John Katko, remains the ranking member on the House Homeland Security Committee. The ten Republicans who voted to impeach may have angered some constituents at home, but they have not suffered retribution at the hands of their party’s leadership in Washington.

Republicans say they have no idea what Cheney’s game is. Axios reports she has been deliberately “baiting” the GOP, welcoming the increasing likelihood that she will be removed from leadership. In an interview with the New York Post, Cheney did not rule out running for president in 2024, arguing that some of the current candidates should be disqualified from serious consideration because of their support for the January 6 challenge to the Electoral College certification.

Is that a winning 2024 platform? Anything is possible, but it is difficult to imagine that, given everything that has happened and will happen between now and November 5, 2024, voters will choose the candidate who most enthusiastically re-litigates the events of four years earlier.

Some point to Cheney’s family heritage — her father’s roles as White House chief of staff, member of the House, Secretary of Defense, and, finally, as Vice President of the United States — as proof that she has keen political instincts. But the fact is, Cheney can also been astonishingly ham-fisted. Back in 2013, without ever having run for elective office, she tried to big-foot Wyoming Republican Senator Mike Enzi out of his race for re-election. Enzi was more popular with voters than Cheney reckoned, and she dropped her challenge.

Now, having again alienated a lot of her fellow Republicans, Cheney might soon be voted out of her leadership position. She will remain a member of the House, of course, and will remain a media favorite for quotes in stories about Republican divisions. Her long-term strategy, if there is one, remains a mystery to her GOP colleagues. They just know that they’re ready to move on.

For a deeper dive into many of the topics covered in the Daily Memo, please listen to my podcast, The Byron York Show — available on the Ricochet Audio Network and everywhere else podcasts can be found. You can use this link to subscribe.