US Politics

What is the point of the Republican party?This isn’t a flip question. It’s one prompted by the last four months of grappling with the fallout of the bloody insurrection on Capitol Hill, and by the last four years of grappling with the fallout of installing a fascist in the White House.So, for real: what does the GOP stand for? Apart from trying to seize back power, what does it want to do?The answer, as Liz Cheney has learned, is to pander to the ego of a single Florida resident who has no obvious or coherent political purpose.This might just explain why the party has been struggling so hard to respond to the last four months of the most tenuous Democratic control in Washington.The Biden team has not commanded the nation’s capital from a position of strength because of LBJ-like powers of persuasion, Democratic unity or structural majorities. They have succeeded because Republicans sorely lack – as George HW Bush used to put it – the vision thing.There was a time, not so long ago, when the GOP stood for small government, or big business, or at least big churches, or sometimes the little guy. They were for standing up to foreign enemies and domestic taxes.There was, for what it was worth, a contest of ideas and worldviews between the two sides of the aisle: between the notion that government could do big things, and that government should only do small things – that markets and businesses either needed regulation, or were marvelously efficient at solving all our problems.After four years of Donald Trump, that is no longer the world we’re living in. To be fair, three decades’ worth of upheaval – the colossal failures of the war on terror, the financial crisis, a historic pandemic, the climate crisis and a technological revolution – may have made matters worse.But here we are nonetheless at a point where the Grand Old Party has shrunk into a small old cult of personality, willing to twist and turn to the whims of its sociopathic former leader.Consistency meant nothing inside the cult. More billions of spending on a nonsensical border wall? The deficit hawks said no problem. More bullying business leaders by presidential tweet? The capitalist caucus said bring it on. More cozying up to the leaders of Russia, China and even North Korea? The defense hawks thought that sounded fine. Paying off porn stars with campaign dollars? The party of family values barely blushed.Each one of these big and small sellouts brought the party to the point where it fired Liz Cheney from the House leadership on Tuesday for stating the obvious: Trump lost the election last year and stoked an insurrection to save face.Cheney is a conservative’s conservative, who voted with Trump 92.9% of the time – more than the party’s Senate leader, Mitch McConnell. But Cheney knows that if we cannot agree on democratic principles like free and fair elections, or the constitution, we cannot begin to debate the principles or policies that separate Republicans from Democrats.“I am a conservative Republican and the most conservative of conservative principles is reverence for the rule of law. The electoral college has voted. More than 60 state and federal courts, including multiple judges he appointed, have rejected the former president’s claims,” she said on the House floor on Tuesday.“Those who refuse to accept the rulings of our courts are at war with the constitution. Our duty is clear. Every one of us who has sworn the oath must act to prevent the unraveling of our democracy. This is not about policy. This is not about partisanship. This is about our duty as Americans. Remaining silent, and ignoring the lie, emboldens the liar.”Clearly most Republican members of Congress don’t care – mostly because they think they are on a winning track. There is a near-universal expectation that the Republicans will take back at least half of Congress next year, and that its lickspittle House leader Kevin McCarthy, will finally rise from his semi-prone position to become speaker.Democrats have succeeded because Republicans sorely lack – as George HW Bush used to put it – the vision thingBut while incumbent presidents tend to lose power in their first midterms, there is nothing pre-ordained about this prognosis. It just gets repeated so often, it feels that way.There was a president, not so long ago, who bucked that trend. His name was George W Bush and his vice-president was a man named Dick Cheney, father of Liz. While their opponents wanted to re-litigate the disputed election of 2000, Bush and Cheney were focused on supposedly keeping the country safe.Yes, the 2002 elections were the first after the 9/11 attacks, but the framing was devastatingly effective: are you with the president’s party, or with the terrorists? It wasn’t fair or accurate, but it was simple and successful enough to pick up seats in both the House and Senate.It’s not hard to imagine a similar election for Democrats next year, the first after Covid is finally crushed. Are you for or against the pandemic? Are you for or against building back better? Are you for or against investing in bridges, or childcare, or community college?Instead, the Republican party is determined to answer its own burning question about whether you are for or against Donald Trump.This may satisfy the legions of hardcore Trump fans, but they clearly do not represent a winning majority. So far, their broader attempts to portray Joe Biden as a scary socialist have failed: Biden’s approval ratings are much higher than Trump’s, and that includes positive ratings from almost half of Republicans.Where does the GOP end up? Much like its sidekick for the last several decades, the National Rifle Association. The NRA has been a fearsomely effective political machine, blocking any attempt at gun safety laws by mobilizing just 5 million members. Along the way, it became a cult of personality and corruption revolving around its leader, Wayne LaPierre.Now, after a failed legal gambit to declare bankruptcy, it faces the full force of New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, who is suing to shut the NRA down. “The rot runs deep,” she said on Tuesday. “No one is above the law. Not even one of the most powerful lobbying organizations in the country.”The rot runs deep across the right. Powerful political parties and organizations can suddenly seem brittle after years of hollowing out. Americans might love big personalities, but they love the law even more. More

US consumer prices soared in April as post-lockdown demand and shortages drove up the cost of a wide range of goods, from used cars and home furnishings to airline tickets.The news triggered a further slide in markets unsettled this week by the threat of rising prices, which could force central banks to abandon zero0-interest rate policies that have helped stoke share prices. The Dow Jones index fell 1.3% in early trading and the tech-heavy Nasdaq lost 2.5%.The Consumer Price Index (CPI) climbed 4.2% during the month from a year earlier, the labor department said, the biggest 12-month increase since September 2008, the height of the financial crisis. The figure was significantly higher than economists had predicted.CPI measures the prices consumers pay for goods and services, including clothes, groceries, restaurant meals, recreational activities and vehicles. This month’s rise saw increases across the board and was driven by many factors.The Biden administration’s economic stimulus package has pumped money into the economy just as it reopens from coronavirus lockdown measures. Fresh demand for goods and services has also outpaced supply, which is still recovering from the lockdowns at the start of the pandemic, leading to shortages for a broad range of goods from lumber and steel to ketchup.Used car and truck prices in particular have surged as a global shortage of microchips has dampened production of new vehicles. The price of a used car rose 10% over the month and topped $25,000 for the first time, about $2,800 higher than in April last year, according to the research firm JD Power.The figures are inflated by a collapse in prices last year as the US economy shut down, but they still caught economists by surprise. Economists surveyed by Bloomberg had expected a 3.6% increase in CPI over the year and a 0.2% increase from March. The monthly increase was 0.8%. The news led US stock markets to fall again after a sharp selloff on Tuesday.The Federal Reserve has predicted a spike in inflation in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic but has said it believes it will be short-lived. Last month Fed chair Jerome Powell said the central bank was watching price increases but was not yet concerned about inflation, arguing “one-time increases in prices are likely to only have transitory effects on inflation”.Others are more concerned. Former treasury secretary Larry Summers has warned the US could face a period of high inflation unseen since the 1970s. Talking to Bloomberg TV he said it was “plain wrong” to suggest that inflation cannot surge unexpectedly.“It may be that a way will be found to bring it under control,” he said. “But as I look at $3tn of stimulus, $2tn of savings overhang, a major acceleration coming from Covid in the rear-view mirror, rates expected by the Federal Reserve to be at zero for three years even in a booming economy, record growth this year, major expansion of the Fed balance sheet, and much new fiscal stimulus to come – I’m worried.”Investors too are now worried that the rise in prices will be higher and more sustained than the central bank believes, and that in order to contain the price surge the Fed may have to increase interest rates sooner than expected from the near zero level it set in March last year as the pandemic struck.“April inflation data far exceeded market expectations,” the Economist Intelligence Unit wrote in a note to investors. “We had expected to see a big jump in year-on-year inflation in April, given the comparison to the depth of the recession in April 2020. However, the month-on-month increase in prices, coming on top of a 0.6% monthly increase in March, was surprisingly strong.”“We do not expect this increase to be replicated again in May, but this will still be enough to lift inflation expectations for the full-year 2021,” the Economist Intelligence Unit wrote. More

After being voted out from her role as House Republican conference chair, Liz Cheney said she planned to ‘lead the fight’ to create a stronger party in the future. The congresswoman said: ‘I will do everything I can to ensure that the former president never again gets anywhere near the Oval Office.’ Cheney was one of 10 Republicans in the House who voted to impeach Trump over the US Capitol breach

Liz Cheney removed from House leadership over Trump criticism
Why did the Republican party oust Liz Cheney? More

Lafayette Square, outside the White House, reopened this week to strolling couples, tourists and scampering children. After nearly a year sealed off by eight-foot metal fencing, it was one more sign of life in America getting back to normal.Then there’s the danger. For more than three months it’s been tempting for many to assume that, with Joe Biden in the White House and Donald Trump off Twitter, democracy survived its near-death experience, recovered and checked out of hospital. But the ousting of Liz Cheney by the Republican party shows that the potential for a relapse is all too real.Cheney, the number three Republican in the House of Representatives, was essentially terminated for refusing to embrace Trump’s “big lie”, the false claim of a stolen presidential election. “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,” she said on the House floor on Tuesday night.Cheney is an unlikely Joan of Arc. Her father, Dick, was George W Bush’s vice president and mastermind of his “war on terror”, torture included. Maureen Dowd, a columnist for the New York Times, notes that Dick Cheney’s big lie about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, defended to the hilt by Liz, “created the template for Trump’s big lie”.But while the messenger is flawed, the message is unassailable: the constitution, the rule of law, an adherence to fact-based reality itself are all imperiled for as long as one of America’s two great parties has gone rogue. Republicans could have seen the light, exorcised Trump and returned to these principles. The deadly insurrection at the US Capitol on 6 January even offered an obvious exit ramp.On that day, Senator Lindsey Graham declared: “Trump and I, we’ve had a hell of a journey. I hate it to end this way… All I can say, is count me out, enough is enough.” Later Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, declared that Trump “bears responsibility” for the attack. Finally, it seemed, the fever was breaking.Yet now McCarthy is the architect of Cheney’s downfall, claiming it essential to party unity, while Graham offered donors the prize of playing a round of golf with himself and Trump.Reports of a civil war within the Republican party were always greatly exaggerated, the result of wishful thinking and restless journalists looking for a new angle. On Tuesday it emerged that more than a hundred Republicans, including former elected officials, are threatening to break away and form a third party – a sign that the struggle for the mother ship itself has been lost.The ousting of Cheney snuffs out all doubt. Republicans don’t think they can win next year’s midterm elections without Trump. McCarthy believes that the “Make America great again movement” is his ticket to the speaker’s chair.He might be right. With redistricting likely to cut into Democrats’ narrow majority, and with historical trends favouring the party that does not hold the White House, Republicans do indeed stand a strong chance of taking back the House, even if the economy is surging under Biden.Tara Setmayer, a political analyst and former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, says: “All of the political winds are at the backs of Republicans to take the House again so they’re catering to the most rabid supporters. These are the folks who pay attention in midterms. It’s a numbers game and they are so close to taking power back in the House.”Which is where things get very dangerous. If Trump is the new church where all must worship, the big lie is the new religion that all must incant, whether with evangelical fervour or at least by showing their face in the pews every Sunday. Cheney’s likely replacement, Elise Stefanik, is actually more moderate (a lifetime rating of just 43.64 by the American Conservative Union, compared to Cheney’s 78.03), but her refusal to denounce the big lie is apparently all that matters.So Republican state legislatures will continue to use the false claims of fraud to justify new voting restrictions that disproportionately affect people of colour. And come the next presidential election, there is reason to doubt whether a Republican-controlled House would certify the win of a Democratic president. The near miss of 2020 could become a full-blown crisis in 2024.Eugene Robinson, a Washington Post columnist, warns: “The greatest threat to our nation’s future is not Covid-19 or the rise of China or even the existential challenge of climate change. It is the Republican party’s attempt to seize and hold power by offering voters the seductive choice of rejecting inconvenient facts and basic logic.”It is easy to assume that Trump was a one-off anomaly and that Biden represents the democratic norm running on autopilot. But what if Biden is the one-off, merely delaying a slide into autocracy? Cheney’s demise is a reminder that though Biden won his “battle for the soul of America”, the war never ends. Complacency is the enemy; vigilance is all. More

Nothing embodies wildness like wolves, our four-legged shadow, the dogs that long ago refused our campfire and today prefer freedom and risk over the soft sofa and short leash. The dogs that howl more than bark, add music to the land, and – if left alone to work their magic – make entire ecosystems healthy and whole.Witness Yellowstone, a national park reborn in the 1990s when wolves, absent for 70 years, were reintroduced. Everything changed for the better. Elk stopped standing around like feedlot cattle. They learned to run like the wind again. Streamside willows and other riparian vegetation, previously trampled by the elk, returned as well, and with it, a chorus of birds. All because of wolves.Yet in the state of Idaho, new legislation signed days ago by Governor Brad Little will allow professional hunters and trappers to use helicopters, snowmobiles, ATVs, night vision equipment, snares and other means to kill roughly 90% of the state’s wolves, knocking them down from an estimated 1,500 to 150. A group of retired state, federal and tribal wildlife managers wrote to Little asking him to veto the wolf kill bill, saying statewide livestock losses to wolves have been under 1% for cattle and 3% for sheep. The group further noted that the overall elk population has actually increased since wolves were reintroduced into Idaho more than two decades ago. It made no difference.Why exterminate the wolves? To make the country safe for cattle and sheep; more productive for deer, elk, caribou and moose. To better fill hunters’ freezers with winter meat. To sell the pelts.But there’s something more. Something nobody talks about.“The wolf exerts a powerful influence on the human imagination,” wrote the nature writer Barry Lopez in Of Wolves and Men. “It takes your stare and turns it back on you.”Maybe the wolf, freer than you or I will ever be, reminds us too much of our own self-domestication. That in a rush to create a stable environment, we’ve put ourselves in stables, and that paradox haunts people who see wolves as something to be feared, hated, destroyed.America’s demonization and slaughter of wolves has been going on for centuries – fed by myths, fairytales, Disney films and more – and continues today, full throttle from Wisconsin to Idaho to Alaska. This is our true forever war – the war on Nature, specifically on wildness and its sinister poster child. The wolf could be out there right now, sneaking under the barbed wire, stalking our profits.In November 2020, the Trump administration, as part of its rollback of environmental regulations, ordered the US Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS) to remove the gray wolf from the endangered species list. Western ranchers and farmers were pleased; wildlife advocates called the decision “willful ignorance”. EcoWatch reported that the de-listing occurred “despite the enduring precarity of wolf populations throughout much of the country. According to the most recent USFWS data, there are only 108 wolves in Washington state, 158 in Oregon, and 15 in California, while wolves are ‘functionally extinct’ in Nevada, Utah, and Colorado.”“Wisconsin’s brutal wolf hunt in late February generated outrage – and for good reason,” Jodi Habush Sinykin, an environmental attorney, and Donald Waller, an ecologist and conservation biologist, wrote in the Washington Post. “Throngs of unlicensed hunters joined those with licenses with packs of dogs, snowmobiles and GPS technology. The wolves stood no chance. This unprecedented hunt took place during the breeding season, killing pregnant females and disrupting family packs at a time critical to pup survival. A full accounting of the hunt’s biological toll is impossible, as the state declined to inspect carcasses.”Who are we, as a species? Are we global gardeners, or might we be good guardians as well?As for Alaska: if you want to see a wolf this summer, skip Denali national park, where the Toklat pack – Alaska’s most famous wolf pack, studied since the late 1930s – has been decimated by hunters and trappers who bait the animals just outside park boundaries. The legendary wildlife biologist Adolph Murie, who studied the Toklat pack for three years and teased apart more than 1,700 scat samples, came to a stunning conclusion: wolves that prey on caribou and Dall sheep primarily take the old or infirm. In effect, they create strong prey populations. Wolves are nature’s chisel and lathe.And wolf attacks on humans are so rare as to be statistically non-existent.Over the past half-century, wildlife around the world has dropped 68%. The human race, together with our livestock, now accounts for more than 95% of all mammal biomass on Earth. Everything else – from whales to wolves to lions, tigers and bears – adds up to only 4.2%. And that percentage continues to fall.Knowing that, who are we, as a species? Are we global gardeners who manage everything – plant and animal – as crops on a sustained yield basis, where wildlife is game and wolves are pests? Or might we be good guardians as well, caretakers who regard others beyond ourselves as capable of love; of celebrating their young and mourning their dead?While writing Of Wolves and Men in the late 1970s, Barry Lopez raised two hybrid red wolves, Prairie and River, an experience that he said gave him “a fundamental joy”. He concluded: “I learned from River that I was a human being and that he was a wolf and that we were different. I valued him as a creature, but he did not have to be what I imagined he was. It is with this freedom from dogma, I think, that the meaning of the words ‘the celebration of life’ becomes clear.”
Kim Heacox is the author of many books, including The Only Kayak, a memoir, and Jimmy Bluefeather, a novel, both winners of the National Outdoor Book Award. He lives in Alaska More

Why is this happening?The recall election may seem like an oddity, considering Gavin Newsom, the Democratic governor, remains fairly popular across the state.But in California, a small but vocal minority can make a recall election happen. According to state rules, a recall election will be called if 12% of people who voted in the last election sign a petition saying they want one.A Republican-led effort to recall the governor, launched in early 2020, gained traction amid the pandemic. Some residents balked at the state’s strict Covid restrictions, while others saw California’s high death toll as a sign of Newsom’s leadership failures.In April, the recall campaign announced it had enough valid signatures – 1,626,042 in total – to trigger an election.How does a recall work?California is one of 19 states that allow voters to recall and remove state officials from office before their terms end.In California, a recall can happen at almost any time for any reason, if enough registered voters support it. Once the signature threshold is hit, voters get 30 days to strike their signatures from the recall petition – and if enough change their minds, the recall effort will fail. But Joshua Spivak, a senior fellow at the Hugh L Carey Institute for Government Reform at Wagner College and an expert on recalls, says that “seems quite unlikely” this time around.Next, officials will run an estimate of how much the recall election will cost, and the state’s lieutenant governor will set a date for the election.On election day, voters will be asked two questions: whether they want to recall Newsom, yes or no – and if more than 50% say “yes”, who should replace him?Who wants to recall Newsom?The campaign, spearheaded by the Republican former sheriff’s deputy Orrin Heatlie, has come out against the Newsom administration’s pandemic-era lockdowns, aid to undocumented immigrants and homeless residents, relatively high taxes and spending on social programs.The effort has picked up financial support from big business donors and a few Silicon Valley venture capitalists, including the former Facebook executive Chamath Palihapitiya. Far-right movements including QAnon have also bolstered the effort – though recall organizers have tried to distance themselves from those groups following the deadly 6 January attack on the US capitol.In a state that leans heavily liberal (Donald Trump lost in 2020 by 30 points), the recall petition was an unlikely success.So how did the recall gain momentum?Republicans have been trying to recall Newsom since he first took office. Five attempts failed to get enough valid signatures. But the sixth time was the charm.This latest recall effort was launched in February 2020 – before the worst of the pandemic hit California. Recallers had 160 days, or until 17 November, to gather enough signatures. By that date, the campaign had just 749,196 signatures – not nearly enough.But as coronavirus shut the state down, the Sacramento county superior court extended the deadline – arguing it had become “extremely difficult for petitioners to engage in signature-gathering activities for their proposed initiative”.Around then, California entered its most severe, deadly phase of the pandemic. Conservatives protested against the governor’s strict lockdown measures, staging anti-mask rallies. Meanwhile, many of Newsom’s Democratic allies in the legislature worried he wasn’t acting fast enough to stem the wave of infections and deaths.The governor didn’t help his case when he attended a dinner party at the Michelin-starred French Laundry in Napa with bigwig lobbyists – flaunting wealth and flouting mask requirements as the coronavirus death count ticked up.In the following weeks, hospitals were overwhelmed with Covid patients and morgues with the dead. The state employment development department was swindled, on the governor’s watch, into paying billions in fraudulent unemployment claims as millions of jobless Californians struggled for aid.As frustration grew, recallers were able to gather more than a million additional signatures.How likely is the recall to succeed?Newsom’s popularity peaked early in the pandemic, with an approval rating of 63% in May 2020. That figure dropped precipitously amid the last coronavirus surge but is rising again as the state recovers and reopens.Recent polling from the Public Policy Institute of California found that 56% of likely voters oppose removing Newsom from office, and 5% are unsure. Newsom, who was elected to office with the support of more than 60% of voters, remains in a strong spot.And the governor, aware that his political future hinges on the state’s recovery, has launched a number of big programs including the $100bn “California Comeback Plan” to send most Californians additional stimulus checks and provide billions in rent relief.Moreover, “throughout California history, gubernatorial recalls have been largely unsuccessful,” Spivak said. Since 1913, there have been 55 attempts to recall the governor – and only one effort qualified for the ballot, in 2003.That election saw Gray Davis, an unpopular Democrat, removed from office and replaced by the Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger – who was able to leverage his acting fame and family political connections.Who’s challenging the governor?There’s no limit to the number of candidates who can challenge Newsom – and a number of hopefuls have already launched their campaigns. The businessman John Cox is currently touring with a domesticated Kodiak bear. Kevin Faulconer, the former mayor of San Diego, and Doug Ose, a former US representative, are also challenging the governor, as is Caitlyn Jenner, the former Olympic athlete and reality TV star.None of these candidates would stand any real chance against Newsom in a general election. Cox, who ran against Newsom in 2018, lost by nearly 24 points. “The recall can be a rallying cry, in California and across the county,” Mindy Romero, the founder of the Center for Inclusive Democracy, a non-partisan research organization, told the Guardian in March. “For the Republican candidates running against the governor, it can raise their national profiles.”That’s also the case for celebrities: the porn actor Mary Carey and billboard model Angelyne, both of whom ran during the state’s last gubernatorial recall, are back in the game this year.Notably missing from the race so far: a Democrat. The party has largely coalesced around Newsom with progressives and moderates, in California and in DC, throwing their support behind the governor.Still, Spivak said, the coming months could bring political surprises. And at the very least – they will bring a bevy for political stunts as more and more candidates announce runs. “I think we’re going to see quite a bit of craziness,” he said. More

Congresswoman Liz Cheney of Wyoming is facing removal from her leadership position in the Republican caucus of the House of Representatives on Wednesday morning in an internal battle seen as a bellwether of the future direction of the party.Cheney’s ouster is widely expected after she found herself at odds with other members of Republican leadership over her refusal to stop blaming Donald Trump for inciting the mob attack on the United States Capitol on 6 January.The daughter of the former vice-president Dick Cheney, Cheney has become a symbol of a dwindling band of Republicans largely opposed to Trump’s vice-like grip on the party. Even though she is a staunch conservative, she has faced implacable hostility from Trump and his loyalists.The vote is among members of the Republican caucus in the chamber and is set to be conducted by secret ballot.Cheney had faced the threat of removal from her leading role before, but she survived that handily, in part, thanks to support from other members of Republican leadership. This time is different though. Cheney has lost support from Congressman Kevin McCarthy of California, the House minority leader, and Congressman Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the House minority whip.McCarthy has endorsed Congresswoman Elise Stefanik of New York to replace Cheney.“Yes I do,” the top congressional Republican said in an interview on Fox News when asked if the New York congresswoman had his support now instead of Cheney.McCarthy has been eager to oust Cheney from leadership. He was recently caught on a hot mic saying: “I’ve had it with her.”McCarthy set the vote for a new conference chair for Wednesday. In a letter announcing the new election, the California representative echoed arguments many Republicans made against Cheney – that her ongoing criticism of Trump was distracting from Republicans’ primary efforts to retake control of the House.“This is no time to take our eye off the ball,” McCarthy wrote in the letter. “If we are to succeed in stopping the radical Democrat agenda from destroying our country, these internal conflicts need to be resolved so as to not detract from the efforts of our collective team. Having heard from so many of you in recent days, it’s clear that we need to make a change.”The main driver behind the attack on Cheney, though, has been Trump, who has fumed about Cheney’s criticism and her decision to vote to impeach the president, alongside almost a dozen other House Republicans. Cheney has been the highest-ranking outspoken anti-Trump Republican in Congress. That stance looks to be felt back home where multiple candidates have jumped into the Republican primary to oust Cheney from her congressional seat.Trump and his allies are assessing who to support in that primary. The former president’s political operation is watching the primary field closely, looking to see who might emerge as the strongest challenger to Cheney.Cheney’s troubles are the latest sign that Trump’s influence is still hugely powerful within the Republican party, more so than any of the other recent Republicans who were elected president or were nominated to be president.Cheney herself is no newcomer to primary challengers. She once ran for Senate in Wyoming, challenging then-senator Mike Enzi. She ended up dropping out after failing to get serious traction. She was later elected to Congress as the sole representative from the state.Ahead of the vote, Cheney has some support from some like-minded Republican allies.Expelling Liz Cheney from leadership won’t gain the GOP one additional voter, but it will cost us quite a few.— Mitt Romney (@MittRomney) May 10, 2021
Late on Monday night Congresswoman Jaime Herrera Beutler of Washington’s office said she planned to vote for Cheney to keep her leadership position.“Jaime will be voting to keep the House leadership in place,” Craig Wheeler, a Beutler spokesperson, said in an email to the Guardian.Congressman Adam Kinzinger, another outspoken anti-Trump Republican, has sent fundraising pitches and email list-building pleas in support of Cheney. More