As expected, Republicans in the U.S. House on Wednesday removed, by a voice vote, Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney from her post as Republican Conference chair, the No. 3 post in the party there.
Trump has argued that there was significant vote fraud and/or election misbehavior during the 2020 vote, in which Joe Biden beat him by a handful of only about 43,000 votes spread across a couple of battleground states.
Further, lawsuits still are pending that are explaining the untoward influence that may have been a factor in those results, which were so anomalous that they triggered official protests and requests for investigations.
In fact, several of those states had seen Trump well in the lead when, at virtually the same time, they stopped counting votes. Hours later they resumed, abruptly announcing that Biden was now leading.
Those changes came through dark-of-the-night vote dumps that sometimes were almost 100% for Biden.
What is not in question is the fact that some state officials arbitrarily changed state laws regarding voting procedures – they said it was to accommodate COVID-19. The fact is those changes, documented as recently as this week in Wisconsin, violated the U.S. Constitution’s requirement that state lawmakers establish voting procedures and policies for elections.
The GOP members in the House took a closed-door vote in their weekly meeting, and followed with a debate on who should replace Cheney in the leadership post.
“The frontrunner, Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, has the backing of top leaders Kevin McCarthy, the minority leader and Steve Scalise, the minority whip. Stefanik has also won over Rep. Jim Jordan, a key conservative. All three men are staunch Trump supporters and view Stefanik as a gifted communicator who can unite the party and not instigate a public battle with Trump,” the Examiner explained.
The Republican action indicated the party’s dissatisfaction with Cheney was less for her opposition to Trump, but her decision to continue berating and blasting him publicly, as she won support from her colleagues in a vote several weeks ago.
Cheney has been defiant, continue to blast Trump for his concern over election fraud both before and after her rejection.
Just before, she said, “I will not sit back and watch in silence while others lead our party down a path that abandons the rule of law and joins the former President’s crusade to undermine our democracy.”
After the vote she said she would work to see that Trump never gets anywhere near the White House ever again.
Actually, having served one term, he would be eligible to run for election again in 2024 if he chooses – a decision he has not yet announced.
GOP members apparently felt Cheney was hurting their efforts to build and unify the party – and could have been distracting from the party’s campaign to reclaim the House majority next year.
She also was accused of being for forever wars, with U.S. military troops permanently in various locations around the world.
Republicans apparently decided to move on, without her.
Jordan had charged Cheney with “continually recit[ing] Democrat talking points.”
“And you can’t have a Republican conference chair in the run up to the election, who continually went after our nominee, the president of the United States, the Republican president. I just don’t see how that’s helpful,” he said.
Trump has called Cheney a “poor leader, a major Democrat talking point, a warmonger…”
She also was among the handful of Republicans who voted to impeach Trump after he urged his supporters to protest Biden’s election “peacefully” on Jan. 6, and dozens, or perhaps hundreds, vandalized the U.S. Capitol.
Trump was acquitted in that case, the second time Democrat Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s orchestrated impeach-and-remove attempts against him failed.
Examiner commentator Byron York noted the conflict developed because “Cheney felt a mission to keep pushing against Trump, even as he became a former president living in Palm Beach.”
He explained the party was tolerant of Cheney’s opposition to Trump, up to a point.
“Cheney’s current problems intensified after the first vote on her leadership, when she intensified her campaign against Trump. Cheney’s efforts were undoubtedly media-friendly — she was portrayed as a profile in courage by some media outlets — but many Republicans came to believe, with some reason, that she had become a distraction from the GOP’s mission to oppose the Biden agenda and win back the House in 2022. Instead, Cheney seemed determined to re-fight the battles of November 2020 to January 2021,” York wrote.
And, he said, “Cheney is now making clear that she has become something of a single-issue politician and that her single issue is Trump.”
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