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Liz Cheney made two interesting moves last week. One, she was among the fourteen House Republican who voted to pass the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act that her Wyoming colleagues in the Senate, John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis, refused to support. Two, she offered publicly to instruct her Democratic constituents in the state of Wyoming how to register to vote in the Republican primary election on August 16, thus allowing them to support her against Harriet Hageman, her Trump-endorsed opponent.
For decades Wyoming Democrats have taken advantage of the Wyoming Republican Party’s idiotic policy of allowing cross-over voting in the primaries, thus virtually guaranteeing that the most conservative candidate will be eliminated at the beginning of any electoral proceeding. Winning the Democratic vote in the state has been Cheney’s only hope of being reelected to a fourth term this fall after she succeeded in making her name a household cuss word among Wyoming Republicans by pursuing her personal vendetta against Donald Trump as a member of the Nancy Pelosi’s highly partisan January 6 Committee, whose aim is widely understood to be to ensure that the former president never runs for political office again.
Cheney knows perfectly well that the large majority of Democratic, as well as of Republican, voters in Wyoming abhor gun control in any form. She is counting, however, on her Democratic constituents’ loathing of Donald Trump to set guns aside for the moment and vote for her as a means of taking their revenge on Trump. This seems a safe strategy, as no Democratic candidate has much of a chance, if any, of defeating her.
Also it has become plain that Liz Cheney, besides despising Trump, has come to have no love for Wyoming either, a state to which she has no emotional ties and in which she operates as a resented carpetbagger.
Equally plain is that Cheney’s ultimate ambitions are national and that she is maneuvering to win the Republican nomination for president at some future time, thus routing the MAGA element of the GOP and reinstating the Old Republican-neocon establishment that includes her father and George W. Bush to what she views as its deserved and proper place as the “adult” wing of the party. Her “service” on the Special Committee is part of the strategy she has adopted toward this end. So might winning reelection as House Representative in November be, though at this point she probably does not see doing so as an essential part of her design.
Should, however, Cheney win this fall with substantial Democratic support, she could argue that, as a Republican candidate for the presidency, she would have the advantage of being a proven bipartisan vote-getter in her “home” state. Her desire to be able to make this claim would easily explain her behavior on the Select Committee, and also her vote in favor of the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.
Yet in her unhinged, monomaniacal efforts to destroy Donald Trump Liz Cheney has probably gone too far even for the establishment wing of the GOP by aiding and abetting Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic Party in their months-long attempt to discredit the Republican Party as a whole — not Trump alone — by staging a very public partisan circus calculated to reverse the Republicans’ advantage in the coming midterm elections.
She is playing a dangerous political game whose ruthless dishonesty is typified by her emphasis on the word “me” in quoting Trump’s remark, taken from Cassidy Hutchinson’s recorded testimony before the House, that “They [the insurrectionists] are not here to hurt me,” where none exists in the transcript.
While the GOP has frequently been described in the past as “the stupid party” by Republican conservatives impatient with its moderate members and with the RINOS, it is probably not so stupid as to fail to comprehend the damage the member from Wyoming is conceivably doing to her party. And elephants have long memories.
