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      Republicans Attack Democrats as Liberal Extremists to Regain Power

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      As Democrats prepare to run on an ambitious economic agenda, Republicans are working to caricature them as liberal extremists out of touch with voters’ values.WASHINGTON — Minutes after a group of congressional Democrats unveiled a bill recently to add seats to the Supreme Court, the Iowa Republican Party slammed Representative Cindy Axne, a Democrat and potential Senate candidate, over the issue.“Will Axne Pack the Court?” was the headline on a statement the party rushed out, saying the move to expand the court “puts our democracy at risk.”The attack vividly illustrated the emerging Republican strategy for an intensive drive to try to take back the House and the Senate in the 2022 midterm elections. Republicans are mostly steering clear of Democrats’ economic initiatives that have proved popular, such as an infrastructure package and a stimulus law that coupled pandemic relief with major expansions of safety-net programs, and are focusing instead on polarizing issues that stoke conservative outrage.In doing so, they are seizing on measures like the court-expansion bill and calls to defund the police — which many Democrats oppose — as well as efforts to provide legal status to undocumented immigrants and grant statehood to the District of Columbia to caricature the party as extreme and out of touch with mainstream America.Republicans are also hammering at issues of race and sexual orientation, seeking to use Democrats’ push to confront systemic racism and safeguard transgender rights as attack lines.The approach comes as President Biden and Democrats, eager to capitalize on their unified control of Congress and the White House, have become increasingly bold about speaking about such issues and promoting a wide array of party priorities that languished during years of Republican rule. It has given Republicans ample fodder for attacks that have proved potent in the past.“They are putting the ball on the tee, handing me the club and putting the wind at my back,” said Jeff Kaufmann, the chairman of the Iowa Republican Party.Democrats argue that Republicans are focusing on side issues and twisting their positions because the G.O.P. has nothing else to campaign on, as Democrats line up accomplishments to show to voters, including the pandemic aid bill that passed without a single Republican vote.“That was very popular, and I can understand why Republicans don’t want to talk about it,” said Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, the new chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. “But we’re going to keep reminding folks who was there when they needed them.”The contrast is likely to define the 2022 races. Democrats will sell the ambitious agenda they are pursuing with Mr. Biden, take credit for what they hope will continue to be a surging economy and portray Republicans as an increasingly extreme party pushing Donald J. Trump’s lies about a stolen election. Republicans, who have embraced the false claims of election fraud and plan to use them to energize their conservative base, will complain of “radical” Democratic overreach and try to amplify culture-war issues they think will propel more voters into their party’s arms.A release from the National Republican Senatorial Committee highlighted what it called the “three pillars” of the Democratic agenda: “The Green New Deal, court packing and defund the police,” even though the first two are far from the front-burner issues for Mr. Biden and Democratic leaders and the third is a nonstarter with the bulk of the party’s rank and file.President Biden and Democrats have promoted a wide array of party priorities that languished during years of Republican rule.Stefani Reynolds for The New York TimesLast week Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, sought to thrust a new issue into the mix, leading Republicans in protest of a proposed Biden administration rule promoting education programs that address systemic racism and the nation’s legacy of slavery. He has taken particular aim at the 1619 Project, a journalism initiative by The New York Times that identifies the year when slaves were first brought to America as a key moment in history.“There are a lot of exotic notions about what are the most important points in American history,” Mr. McConnell said on Monday during an appearance in Louisville. “I simply disagree with the notion that The New York Times laid out there that year 1619 was one of those years.”Senator Rick Scott of Florida, the chairman of the Republicans’ Senate campaign arm, has been explicit about his strategy.“Now what I talk about every day is do we want open borders? No. Do we want to shut down our schools? No. Do we want men playing in women’s sports? No,” Mr. Scott said during a recent radio interview with the conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt.“Do we want to shut down the Keystone pipeline? No. Do we want voter ID? Yes,” he continued. “And the Democrats are on the opposite side of all those issues, and I’m going to make sure every American knows about it.”Democrats who have fallen victim to the Republican cultural assault concede that it can take a toll and that their party needs to be ready.“It was all these different attacks that were spread all over mainstream media, Spanish-language media, Facebook, WhatsApp,” said Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, a former Democratic House member from South Florida who was defeated last year after Republicans portrayed her as a socialist who was anti-police. “A lot of it was misinformation, false attacks.”She said Democrats must begin taking steps now to combat Republican misdirection, warning that their legislative victories might not be enough to appeal to voters.“We can have a great policy record,” she said, “but we need to be present in our communities right now, reaching out to all of our constituencies to tell them we are working for them, that their health and their jobs are our priorities.”On the Supreme Court issue, progressive groups began pushing the idea of an expansion after Mr. Trump was able to appoint three justices, including one to a vacancy that Republicans blocked Barack Obama from filling in the last year of his presidency and another who was fast-tracked right before last year’s election.Hoping to neutralize the issue, some Senate Democrats who will be on the ballot next year have made it clear that they would oppose expanding the court, and the bill seems to be going nowhere at the moment. Speaker Nancy Pelosi said she would not bring any court bill to the floor until at least after a commission named by Mr. Biden to study the matter issued its report, which is due in six months. The president has been cool to the expansion idea as well.The office of Ms. Axne, the only Democrat in Congress from Iowa, did not respond to requests for reaction to the Republican attacks on her over the court plan. In an interview with MSNBC, Ms. Axne said that she, like Ms. Pelosi, would await the findings of the commission.But Republicans are not waiting to try to score political points. They say more moderate Republican voters and independents who broke with the party during the Trump years have been alienated by the call to enlarge the court and other initiatives being pushed by progressives.One key for Republicans next year will be winning back suburban voters while running campaigns that also energize the significant segment of their supporters who are fiercely loyal to Mr. Trump and want the party to represent his values. That may be a difficult balance to achieve, as evidenced this week when Republican leaders moved to strip Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming of the party’s No. 3 leadership post for calling out the former president’s false election claims.Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the majority leader, said it would matter less what Republicans said about Democrats than what his party was able to accomplish.“The one thing that will win people over, no matter what they do, is whether we can deliver,” he said. “They are doing what appeals to their base, but the voters in the middle, including a good chunk of Republican voters, actually care about getting things done.”Instead of focusing on Democrats’ economic initiatives that have proved popular, Republicans are seizing on measures like a bill to expand the Supreme Court.Al Drago for The New York TimesMr. Peters said Democrats would be better positioned to rebut attacks such as those that falsely portray them as pressing to defund the police after voters had experienced two years of the party holding power.“President Biden and the caucus have been very clear that we are not about defunding the police, we are about making sure police have the resources they need to do their jobs,” he said. “Ultimately, it is about how it is impacting people’s lives.”Mr. Kaufmann, the Republican leader in Iowa, begged to differ. He said he believed the hot-button issues Republicans were homing in on would drive voters more than “the nuance of tax policy and who gets credit for the vaccine.” He is eager to get started.“Some of this stuff is really controversial,” he said. “These are all very bold and clearly delineated issues. I can use this to expand the base and get crossover voters.” More

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      Stefanik Moves to Oust Cheney, Resurfacing False Election Claims

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      Republicans say Liz Cheney, their No. 3, is being targeted because she won’t stay quiet about Donald J. Trump’s election lies. Her would-be replacement is campaigning on them.WASHINGTON — As House Republicans have made the case for ousting Representative Liz Cheney, their No. 3, from their leadership ranks, they have insisted that it is not her repudiation of former President Donald J. Trump’s election lies that they find untenable, but her determination to be vocal about it.But on Thursday, Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the Republican whom leaders have anointed as Ms. Cheney’s replacement in waiting, loudly resurrected his false narrative, citing “unprecedented, unconstitutional overreach” by election officials in 2020 and endorsing an audit in Arizona that has become the latest avenue for conservatives to try to cast doubt on the results.“It is important to stand up for these constitutional issues, and these are questions that are going to have to be answered before we head into the 2022 midterms,” Ms. Stefanik told Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former strategist, in the first of a pair of interviews on Thursday with hard-right acolytes of the former president.The comments, Ms. Stefanik’s first in public since she announced she was taking on Ms. Cheney, reflected how central the former president’s election lies have become to the Republican Party message, even as its leaders insist they are determined to move beyond them and focus on attacking Democrats as radical, big-spending socialists before the 2022 midterm elections.Far from staying quiet about the false election claims on Thursday, Ms. Stefanik effectively campaigned on them, describing Mr. Trump on Mr. Bannon’s show as the “strongest supporter of any president when it comes to standing up for the Constitution,” and asserting that Republicans would work with him as “one team.”“The job of the conference chair is to represent the majority of the House Republicans, and the vast majority of the House Republicans support President Trump, and they support his focus on election integrity and election security,” Ms. Stefanik later told Sebastian Gorka, a former adviser to Mr. Trump. The job, she said in an unmistakable jab at Ms. Cheney, “is not to attack members of the conference and attack President Trump.”While Ms. Stefanik avoided claiming outright that the election was stolen, she praised the Arizona audit, a Republican-led endeavor that critics in both parties have described as a blow to democratic norms and a political embarrassment, as “incredibly important.” She said recounting votes there and scrutinizing how Pennsylvania and other states administered the 2020 election were “valid, important questions and issues that the American people deserve policy proposals and answers on.”It was a stark contrast from Ms. Cheney, who has relentlessly upbraided the former president for falsely claiming the election was stolen and on Wednesday beseeched Republican lawmakers in a scathing opinion piece to excise him from the party. Ms. Cheney voted against her party’s efforts to invalidate the election results on Jan. 6, while Ms. Stefanik — like most House Republicans — voted to reject Pennsylvania’s electoral votes for President Biden.Some Republicans, including the hard-right lawmakers who led a charge to try to remove Ms. Cheney in February after she voted to impeach Mr. Trump, readily conceded that they were unwilling to tolerate dissent from their party leaders.“All the polling indicates that President Trump is still the titleholder,” Representative Andy Biggs of Arizona, the chairman of the Freedom Caucus, said on Fox News. Ms. Cheney “can tell what her version of the truth is, but she can’t do it as the leader of the Republican Party in Congress.”For many Republicans, however, the calculation to boot Ms. Cheney, a strict conservative, in favor of Ms. Stefanik, who has a far more moderate voting record but has wholeheartedly embraced Mr. Trump, is more complicated.In interviews with lawmakers and party operatives, all of whom requested anonymity to discuss the internal turmoil, several expressed concern about the optics of purging the only female member of leadership and a daughter of a conservative dynasty for her resolve to call out Mr. Trump’s lies. They worried that the move to oust Ms. Cheney could spook donors who might chafe at sending money to Republicans so closely associated with the Jan. 6 riot, and ultimately voters who might be alienated by the party’s refusal to brook dissent.But they were also wrestling with the political downsides of keeping Ms. Cheney in her post, worried that they would continue to be forced to answer for her unyielding broadsides against the myth of a stolen election that many of their voters believe. Several lawmakers privately lamented her stubbornness and said they wished Ms. Cheney would focus solely on attacking Democrats.Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the Republican whom leaders have annointed as Ms. Cheney’s replacement in waiting, has loudly resurrected Mr. Trump’s false election narrative.Cindy Schultz for The New York TimesThat has been the approach taken by Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the minority leader, who was initially vocal in his criticism of Mr. Trump and support of Ms. Cheney, but more recently has refused to broach either subject.On Thursday, for the second day in a row, he sidestepped questions about Mr. Trump and Ms. Cheney, saying he was solely focused on challenging Mr. Biden and Democrats, and “looking forward — not backward.”“Members do not want to have to defend themselves against attacks from members of their own leadership team,” said John Feehery, a Republican strategist and former House leadership aide. “The primary job of the House Republican Conference chair is to set up and facilitate the weekly press conferences conducted by the House Republican leadership. If you go out of your way to embarrass your leaders at those press conferences, you are not doing your job and you won’t last in that position very long.”Representative Ashley Hinson of Iowa, a rising freshman star who voted against her party’s attempt to invalidate the election results, came out on Thursday in support of Ms. Stefanik, saying she respected Ms. Cheney’s “strong conservative record and service to our country” but wanted relief from the infighting that had plagued the conference.“If Republicans are divided, and not focusing all of our efforts against radical Democrat policies, Speaker Pelosi will remain in power,” Ms. Hinson said in a statement that called Ms. Stefanik “the right person to unify and lead our conference at this time.”Others appeared torn. Representative Nancy Mace, Republican of South Carolina, who had vocally condemned Mr. Trump for his role in encouraging the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6 and warned that the Republican Party could not define itself solely around the former president, said she was tired of “having these fights publicly.”“I want to move forward,” Ms. Mace told Fox Business’s Neil Cavuto. “I want to win back the House in a year and a half. We can get the majority back, and we’ve got to stop fighting with each other in public.”Ms. Mace warned that if the party continued “to make our party and our country about one person, and not about hard-working Americans in the this country, we’re going to continue to lose elections.” Asked whether she was referring to Mr. Trump or Ms. Cheney, Ms. Mace replied, “All of the above.”Some arch-conservative Republicans who are eager to oust Ms. Cheney — many of whom have despised her hawkish foreign policy views for years — have been quietly skeptical of Ms. Stefanik despite her endorsement from Mr. Trump, noting the low rankings conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation and American Conservative Union have given her. On Wednesday night, the anti-tax Club for Growth opposed her campaign, branding her “a liberal.”“House Republicans should find a conservative to lead messaging and win back the House Majority,” the group wrote in a statement on Twitter.But despite the hand-wringing among the rank-and-file, by Thursday, Ms. Stefanik’s allies, including Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, one of the founders of the Freedom Caucus, publicly predicted that she would be conference chairwoman as soon as Wednesday, when Republicans plan to meet.“For sure the votes are there,” Mr. Jordan said on Fox News. “You can’t have a Republican conference chair taking a position that 90 percent of the party disagrees with, and you can’t have a Republican Party chair consistently speaking out against the individual who 74 million Americans voted for.”Carl Hulse More

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      In Turning on Liz Cheney, G.O.P. Bows to Trump’s Election Lies

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      House Republicans were lobbying to replace Representative Liz Cheney, who has vocally called out Donald J. Trump’s lies, with Representative Elise Stefanik, who has embraced them.WASHINGTON — Top Republicans moved swiftly on Wednesday to purge Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming from their leadership ranks for vocally rejecting Donald J. Trump’s election lies, laying the groundwork to install a replacement who has embraced his false claims of voting fraud.The move to push out Ms. Cheney as the No. 3 House Republican in favor of Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, a Trump loyalist who voted to overturn President Biden’s victory in key states, reflected how thoroughly the party’s orthodoxy has come to be defined by fealty to the former president and a tolerance for misinformation, rather than policy principles.“The Republican Party is at a turning point, and Republicans must decide whether we are going to choose truth and fidelity to the Constitution,” Ms. Cheney wrote in a searing opinion piece published in the Washington Post on Wednesday evening. She framed her fate as a referendum on the party’s future and warned that Republicans must “steer away from the dangerous and anti-democratic Trump cult of personality.”Ms. Cheney, 54, is a conservative who rarely defected from Mr. Trump’s policy positions in Congress, but she has refused to absolve him or the party of their roles in fomenting the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol with groundless claims of fraud in the 2020 election. Ms. Stefanik, 36, is more moderate and has more often parted ways with Republicans over her years in Congress, but she has emerged recently as one of Mr. Trump’s most vociferous defenders, willing to indulge and even amplify those claims.After days of quiet discussions about ousting Ms. Cheney, the effort erupted into open Republican warfare on Wednesday morning. Party leaders and Mr. Trump himself publicly boosted Ms. Stefanik, both women issued defiant statements about their intentions and dueling factions in the party competed to frame an episode with broad implications for the 2022 midterm elections and beyond.By day’s end, even President Biden had weighed in on what he called a “mini-rebellion” in the Republican ranks, arguing that the party was plagued by an inability to define itself.The turmoil illustrated how heavily Mr. Trump still looms over the Republican Party, where a pilgrimage to pay homage to the former president at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Fla., has become a required stop for elected leaders and efforts to restrict voting — in the name of his claims of a stolen election — are proliferating around the country.What was clear on Wednesday was that House Republicans were headed for a confrontation, as soon as next week, that now appears likely to result in Ms. Cheney’s firing from her leadership post. Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 Republican, became the highest-ranking figure to call for her removal, endorsing Ms. Stefanik as Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, the minority leader, lobbied behind the scenes on the New Yorker’s behalf.“House Republicans need to be solely focused on taking back the House in 2022 and fighting against Speaker Pelosi and President Biden’s radical socialist agenda,” said Lauren Fine, a spokeswoman for Mr. Scalise. “Elise Stefanik is strongly committed to doing that, which is why Whip Scalise has pledged to support her for conference chair.”Support from Mr. McCarthy, in particular, had helped save Ms. Cheney from a similar challenge in February after her vote to impeach Mr. Trump. But the top leader, like rank-and-file Republicans, had grown increasingly frustrated in recent weeks as Ms. Cheney continued to call out Mr. Trump in media interviews and took shots at her own party for tolerating his falsehoods, including during a party retreat in Orlando last week.By Wednesday, as it became clear that Mr. McCarthy had turned on her, Ms. Cheney was hitting back at him personally, noting that while the leader had initially condemned Mr. Trump for failing to call off his supporters during the Jan. 6 riot, “he has since changed his story.”Mr. Trump, who had been furious at Mr. McCarthy and others for backing Ms. Cheney earlier this year, sought to drive a nail in her political coffin on Wednesday. In a statement, he derided her as a “warmongering fool” and endorsed Ms. Stefanik, whom he called “a far superior choice.”“We want leaders who believe in the Make America Great Again movement, and prioritize the values of America First,” he wrote. “Elise is a tough and smart communicator!”Ms. Stefanik, a fourth-term congresswoman representing New York’s Adirondack region, had initially been wary of appearing as if she was pushing Ms. Cheney out for personal gain. But mere minutes after receiving Mr. Trump’s support, she abandoned any hint of reticence and took her campaign to replace Ms. Cheney public. “We are unified and focused on FIRING PELOSI & WINNING in 2022!” she wrote on Twitter.Seeing votes stacking up against Ms. Cheney, her supporters said she would not fight the drive to dethrone her; unlike in February, she has not tried to rally her allies on or off Capitol Hill. But they said she also did not intend to go quietly.Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, perhaps Ms. Cheney’s most outspoken supporter, demanded on Twitter that every lawmaker “go on the record as to how they will vote on @RepLizCheney in operation #coverupJan6 and concerned donors should take notes.”Ms. Cheney herself sought to appeal to like-minded Republicans in her opinion piece, warning that they risked driving the party toward irrelevance for short-term gain.“While embracing or ignoring Trump’s statements might seem attractive to some for fund-raising and political purposes, that approach will do profound long-term damage to our party and our country,” Ms. Cheney wrote. “Trump has never expressed remorse or regret for the attack of Jan. 6 and now suggests that our elections, and our legal and constitutional system, cannot be trusted to do the will of the people. This is immensely harmful.”Yet she found few other Republicans willing to defend her publicly, even among those who forcefully condemned Mr. Trump after Jan. 6 and sought to wrestle control of the party away from him.Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader who vocally stood behind Ms. Cheney in the past and had previously made clear he wanted to purge Mr. Trump from the party, declined to address her predicament on Wednesday.“One hundred percent of my focus is on stopping this administration,” he said, repeating the sentence almost word for word in response to follow-up questions about the move to oust Ms. Cheney.Weighing in on Wednesday from the White House, Mr. Biden, who has sought out Republican support to pass a series of sprawling infrastructure plans, expressed regret about what he characterized as a party at risk of imploding.“We badly need a Republican Party,” Mr. Biden said. “We need a two-party system. It’s not healthy to have a one-party system.”In rallying around Ms. Stefanik, Republicans were turning to a figure who has embodied elements of the party’s transformation since she arrived in the House in 2015, as the youngest woman ever elected to Congress at the time. A Harvard graduate and former aide to President George W. Bush and Speaker Paul D. Ryan, the 2012 vice-presidential nominee, Ms. Stefanik has shifted easily from the old Republican establishment to a new one forming around Mr. Trump.Representative Liz Cheney has refused to absolve Mr. Trump or the Republican Party of their roles in fomenting the assault on the Capitol.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesWhile she began as one of the more moderate members of the Republican Conference — her voting record is far less conservative than Ms. Cheney’s, according to the conservative Heritage Foundation — Ms. Stefanik became one of Mr. Trump’s most strident loyalists. That role has buoyed her rapid ascension and brought in millions of dollars in campaign donations.In a lengthy, error-riddled statement published on Jan. 6 explaining why she would vote to invalidate the election, Ms. Stefanik repeated a number of Mr. Trump’s baseless claims of widespread improprieties, including incorrectly claiming that “more than 140,000 votes came from underage, deceased and otherwise unauthorized voters” in one county in Georgia alone.Her metamorphosis mirrored that of her upstate New York district, where voters had supported a string of Democratic presidential candidates — including Barack Obama twice — before throwing their backing to Mr. Trump in 2016.Yet Ms. Stefanik has also been at the forefront of her party’s efforts to improve its standing and representation among women at a time when Mr. Trump’s caustic style threatened to alienate them and further narrow Republicans’ appeal. Her political action committee supported several of the current freshman class’s rising stars, all of them women who almost single-handedly secured the party’s impressive gains against Democrats in last year’s elections.“I know I am here in Congress because Republican women like Elise Stefanik paved the way,” said Representative Young Kim, Republican of California. “She saw the importance of helping women candidates to make it out of the primary if Republicans were serious about electing more women and growing the G.O.P. base.”Her allies argue that Ms. Stefanik’s ascendancy will bolster the party as Republicans seek to win back the House and the Senate in the midterm elections, describing her as a disciplined messenger with easy mastery over policy.“They are going to find a very smart, charming and confident younger member of Congress,” said Michael Steel, a Republican strategist who worked with Ms. Stefanik as an aide to Mr. Ryan in 2012. “And I think that is a good thing for the Republican Party right now.”In a glowing blurb for Time magazine’s “100 Next” list in 2019, Mr. Ryan, who has also backed Ms. Cheney, hailed Ms. Stefanik as the future of the Republican Party.“Like any good architect, Elise sees around the corner,” Mr. Ryan wrote. “She is thinking about the big picture when the crowd is scrambling to capitalize on the controversy of the day.” More

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      Liz Cheney warns Republicans ‘at turning point’ as she faces removal from leadership

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      Liz Cheney, the third-most-powerful House Republican, has warned that her party is “at a turning point” as it prepares to try to remove her from leadership for rejecting Donald Trump’s false claims about the election.Writing in a defiant op-ed, published by the Washington Post on Wednesday, the Wyoming Republican told her party that standing with Trump meant undermining the rule of law and risking continued violence.“Trump is seeking to unravel critical elements of our constitutional structure that make democracy work – confidence in the result of elections and the rule of law. No other American president has ever done this,” Cheney said in the article.“The Republican party is at a turning point, and Republicans must decide whether we are going to choose truth and fidelity to the constitution.”“History is watching us,” she warned.Her column comes as top members of her party, including Trump and the No 2 House Republican, Steve Scalise, publicly endorsed Representative Elise Stefanik for Cheney’s job as chair of the party’s conference. A vote could come as early as next Wednesday.Trump flexed his muscles anew this week, releasing seven public statements in three days reiterating his false claims that Joe Biden’s 7m-vote margin of victory was the result of fraud, and attacking Republicans including Cheney and Senator Mitt Romney who rejected him.Cheney referenced the president’s behavior in her column, saying that his message was clear. “Trump has repeated his claims that the 2020 election was a fraud and was stolen. His message: I am still the rightful president, and President Biden is illegitimate. Trump repeats these words now with full knowledge that exactly this type of language provoked violence on 6 January.“The question before us now is whether we will join Trump’s crusade to delegitimize and undo the legal outcome of the 2020 election, with all the consequences that might have. I have worked overseas in nations where changes in leadership come only with violence, where democracy takes hold only until the next violent upheaval,” Cheney wrote.She continued: “We must be brave enough to defend the basic principles that underpin and protect our freedom and our democratic process. I am committed to doing that, no matter what the short-term political consequences might be.”Trump’s false claims of widespread fraud have been widely debunked. But Republican-controlled state legislatures are using those claims to justify legislation imposing new restrictions on voting.The Republican representative Adam Kinzinger earlier on Wednesday praised Cheney for standing by her criticism of Trump. “They are trying to remove Liz for telling you the truth, consistently,” said Kinzinger, who like Cheney voted to impeach Trump on a charge of inciting the Capitol riot.The Wall Street Journal’s conservative editorial page also urged Republicans not to oust her.“Purging Liz Cheney for honesty would diminish the party,” it said in a Wednesday opinion piece.In a recent call, the Republican House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, told Donald Trump that Cheney would soon be forced out of her Republican leadership position, the Daily Beast reports.Cheney herself has told other Republicans that it’s not worth holding on to her leadership role as conference chair “if lying is going to be a requirement”, one source told the Daily Beast.Biden said on Wednesday that a “mini-revolution” over identity appeared to be under way in the Republican party.“Republicans are further away from trying to figure out who they are and what they stand for than I thought they would be at this point,” he told reporters at the White House. More

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      The Truth Is About to Set Liz Cheney Free

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      The No. 3 Republican in the House faces a party uprising over her acknowledgment of reality.When Senator Joseph McCarthy was caught on national television pressing a case built on falsehoods against the supposed threat of communism in the U.S. Army, it was his breaking point.Edward R. Murrow gave voice to a frustrated public as it awoke to the bamboozling, and McCarthy’s political career was done.When President Donald Trump perpetrated the false narrative that his re-election had been stolen from him, leading his supporters into what became a fatal attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, he was booted from Twitter and Facebook. But he didn’t lose most of his support.And for the Republican Party’s rank-and-file, whose modern-day Murrow is Tucker Carlson, that falsehood is still the dominant narrative.That fact is hitting home hard on Wednesday for Representative Liz Cheney, the No. 3 Republican in the House, whose refusal to bow to Trump’s lies has put her on the brink of being purged from G.O.P. leadership. In a tweet on Monday, Cheney called out Trump and anyone promoting his stolen election narrative for “spreading THE BIG LIE, turning their back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system.”For House Republicans in thrall to a Trump-loyalist base, and who just weeks earlier had voted down an attempt to depose her, Cheney’s challenge to the story line was a bridge too far. The effort to remove her regained momentum, and on Wednesday Representative Steve Scalise, the Republican whip, became the highest-ranking member of his party to publicly support Cheney’s ouster.Cheney has not shied from the fight: Late Wednesday afternoon, she published an op-ed in The Washington Post entreating her fellow Republicans to respect “the rule of law,” and to be mindful of the eyes of history. “The Republican Party is at a turning point, and Republicans must decide whether we are going to choose truth and fidelity to the Constitution,” she wrote.In the process, they will decide on her fate: House Republicans are expected to hold a vote as early as next week on whether to relieve her of her leadership post.“This is not good for the party, certainly not good for a party that has had problems with suburban women, educated women — to go at somebody because they’re speaking what most of them know is the truth,” said Barbara Comstock, a former Republican congresswoman who represented a district in suburban Virginia until she was swept out by the anti-Trump blue wave in 2018. “Ronald Reagan, who is why I became a Republican, certainly allowed for dissent in his own party, and for people to be critical. I think it’s a very disturbing development.”Representative Elise Stefanik, who hails from an upstate New York district, has emerged as the party’s choice to replace Cheney, and her own history works as a metaphor for what’s going on with the G.O.P. more broadly.Stefanik flipped her district red in 2014, and she had amassed a relatively moderate record until her aggressive questioning of Democratic witnesses during Trump’s first impeachment trial, which earned her direct praise from him. She took his endorsement and ran with it, and in the past year-plus has become a staunch ally to his cause. She disputed the election results in Pennsylvania in a House vote on Jan. 6, and she later voted against impeaching him.Her policies, of course, are another thing entirely. The 36-year-old Stefanik actually voted with Trump less often during his four years as president than Cheney did. Notably, she voted against his signature tax cut bill, which Republicans are now hastening to defend.Pool photo by Caroline BrehmanBut the line that’s being drawn in the Republican sand isn’t about policy. It’s about loyalty to a narrative of Trump’s creation, and in G.O.P. primaries across the country, contravening can be fatal.“The challenge is that members don’t want to be primaried,” said Glen Bolger, a veteran Republican pollster. “These seats are mostly drawn as Democratic or Republican seats, so the way to lose isn’t in November, it’s in a primary.”Still, he added, “the difference between being a majority or a minority is decided in November. But politicians, understandably so, think of themselves first, and what’s good for me is good for the party.”In Texas, a primary election last weekend in a suburban House district set up a confrontation between the two wings of the party. A Trump-backed Republican, Susan Wright, won nearly 20 percent of the vote, while Jake Ellzey, a Republican who has the endorsement of former Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, came in second place. The two candidates now advance to a runoff, and here’s the rub: All the district’s voters will be eligible to participate, not just Republicans.In the Senate, most Republican lawmakers have done their best to look away from the 211-car pileup taking place in the House Republican Conference, and have mostly moved on from discussions of the 2020 election. But there’s far less willingness to do so among House Republicans, whose every-two-year election cycle keeps them in closer conversation with the party’s base.And a flamboyant coterie of relatively young Republican lawmakers in the House has begun to emerge, led in part by Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, a frequent presence on Fox News and prominent Trump ally, who has helped put Stefanik in position for her ascent.Just a month ago, Cheney seemed to have survived the attempt on her political life; her allies in the Wyoming state legislature beat back an effort to change election rules that would have imperiled her in the 2022 primary. The former Republican speakers Paul Ryan and John Boehner committed to helping her fund-raise.Cheney had decided against a run for Senate last year because she saw an auspicious future in the House leadership, possibly even as speaker.But now she finds herself at odds with a party whose leader is silent in the press but still a fan favorite among the party faithful. “A guy who got 47 percent is not the future of our party,” Comstock said, referring to Trump’s total in the 2020 election. “The toxic personality divided our country and is now dividing our party.”On Politics is also available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.Is there anything you think we’re missing? Anything you want to see more of? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com. More

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      Scalise Backs Ouster of Cheney from House G.O.P. Leadership

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      Representative Liz Cheney, Republican of Wyoming, hit back at leaders of her own party on Wednesday, warning her colleagues that “history is watching” as they consider expelling her from their leadership ranks for continuing to reject Donald J. Trump’s election lies.Ms. Cheney’s broadside, published Wednesday afternoon as an opinion essay in The Washington Post, came as the top two House Republicans were working to oust and replace her with a Trump loyalist, and after the former president weighed in demanding Republicans dethrone her. At issue is Ms. Cheney’s insistence on repeatedly rebuking her party for its role in the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob and for embracing Mr. Trump’s lie that he won the 2020 presidential election.In the column, Ms. Cheney warned that the Republican Party was at a “turning point,” and suggested that some Republicans were playing a dangerous game by continuing to support “the dangerous and anti-democratic Trump cult of personality.”“While embracing or ignoring Trump’s statements might seem attractive to some for fund-raising and political purposes, that approach will do profound long-term damage to our party and our country,” Ms. Cheney said. “Trump has never expressed remorse or regret for the attack of Jan. 6 and now suggests that our elections, and our legal and constitutional system, cannot be trusted to do the will of the people. This is immensely harmful.”Ms. Cheney also lashed out at Mr. McCarthy, noting that he initially agreed that Mr. Trump bore responsibility for the riot, only to walk the remarks back.“History is watching. Our children are watching,” Ms. Cheney concluded. “We must be brave enough to defend the basic principles that underpin and protect our freedom and our democratic process. I am committed to doing that, no matter what the short-term political consequences might be.”Ms. Cheney’s column effectively acted as a rejoinder to Representative Steve Scalise of Louisiana, the No. 2 Republican in the chamber, who on Wednesday morning became the highest-ranking party figure to openly call for Ms. Cheney’s ouster and the elevation of Representative Elise Stefanik of New York in her place as chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, the third-ranking position. Lawmakers said Mr. McCarthy was also working the phones behind the scenes, urging colleagues to support Ms. Stefanik, a close ally and rising Republican star.“House Republicans need to be solely focused on taking back the House in 2022 and fighting against Speaker Pelosi and President Biden’s radical socialist agenda,” said Lauren Fine, Mr. Scalise’s spokeswoman. “Elise Stefanik is strongly committed to doing that, which is why Whip Scalise has pledged to support her for conference chair.”Mr. Trump, who has seethed over Ms. Cheney’s criticism of him, piled on a short time later, deriding her as a “warmongering fool” and endorsing Ms. Stefanik, whom he called “a far superior choice.”“We want leaders who believe in the Make America Great Again movement, and prioritize the values of America First,” he wrote in a statement. “Elise is a tough and smart communicator!”Ms. Stefanik, who had been quietly building support among colleagues behind the scenes, wasted no time after Mr. Trump’s endorsement in declaring her intentions publicly. In a post on Twitter just minutes after his statement, she thanked him for his support and said Republicans were “unified and focused on FIRING PELOSI & WINNING in 2022!”It was a remarkable show of force by the party’s top leaders to run out a once-popular figure now deemed unacceptable by fellow Republicans because she has rejected Mr. Trump’s lies and refused to absolve him or the party of its role in perpetuating the false claims of a fraudulent election that fueled the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.The fate of Ms. Cheney, who survived a February bid to oust her after she voted to favor of impeaching Mr. Trump for his role in stirring up the riot, has once again become a bellwether for the direction of the Republican Party. It has implications for Republicans’ chances of wresting control of the House in 2022, and has become a test of whether loyalty to Trump and a tolerance for misinformation have overtaken conservatism as the party’s guiding orthodoxy.The turmoil could come to a head as early as next week, when House Republicans are expected to meet and could call a vote to replace Ms. Cheney. More

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      Constitutional Challenges Loom Over Proposed Voting Bill

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      The sprawling legislation, known as H.R. 1, could result in lawsuits leading to a dozen Supreme Court cases, legal experts said.WASHINGTON — If the sweeping voting rights bill that the House passed in March overcomes substantial hurdles in the Senate to become law, it would reshape American elections and represent a triumph for Democrats eager to combat the wave of election restrictions moving through Republican-controlled state legislatures.But passage of the bill, known as H.R. 1, would end a legislative fight and start a legal war that could dwarf the court challenges aimed at the Affordable Care Act over the past decade.“I have no doubt that if H.R. 1 passes, we’re going to have a dozen major Supreme Court cases on different pieces of it,” said Nicholas Stephanopoulos, a law professor at Harvard.The potential for the bill to set off a sprawling constitutional battle is largely a function of its ambitions. It would end felon disenfranchisement, require independent commissions to draw congressional districts, establish public financing for congressional candidates, order presidential candidates to disclose their tax returns, address dark money in political advertising and restructure the Federal Election Commission.The bill’s opponents say that it is, in the words of an editorial in The National Review, “a frontal assault on the Constitution” and “the most comprehensively unconstitutional bill in modern American history.”More measured critics take issue with specific provisions even as they acknowledge that the very nature of the bill — a grab bag of largely unrelated measures — would make it difficult to attack in a systematic way. In that respect, the anticipated challenges differ from those aimed at the Affordable Care Act, some of which sought to destroy the entire law.John O. McGinnis, a law professor at Northwestern University, said the bill went too far, partly because it was first proposed as an aspirational document rather than a practical one in 2019, when Republicans controlled the Senate and it had no hope of becoming law.“It seems very willing to brush past, at least in some cases, some relatively clear constitutional provisions,” he said, citing parts of the bill that require presidential candidates to disclose their tax returns and force advocacy groups to disclose their contributors.In March, 20 Republican state attorneys general said they were ready to litigate. “Should the act become law,” they wrote in a letter to congressional leaders, “we will seek legal remedies to protect the Constitution, the sovereignty of all states, our elections and the rights of our citizens.”Representative John Sarbanes, Democrat of Maryland and one of the lead authors of the package, said drafters had written it with a fusillade of Republican legal challenges in mind and were confident that it would “survive the great majority of them” in the Supreme Court.“I’m extremely comfortable that we built this to last,” Mr. Sarbanes said. “We think that the components are ones that are well girded against constitutional challenge — even by a court that we can imagine will probably start from a place of favorability to some of these challenges.”Democrats have made the bill a top legislative priority. But with Republicans united in opposition in the Senate, its path forward is rocky.Before a key committee vote this month, proponents of the overhaul are expected to introduce a slew of technical changes meant to address concerns raised by state elections administrators. But pushing it through the full chamber and to President Biden’s desk would require all 50 Senate Democrats to agree to suspend the filibuster rule and pass it on a simple party-line vote, a maneuver that at least two Democrats have so far rejected.Speaker Nancy Pelosi spoke at a news conference promoting H.R. 1 in March. Democrats have made the bill a top legislative priority.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesSome scholars have urged congressional Democrats to concentrate their efforts on narrower legislation, notably the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, which seeks to restore a key provision of the Voting Rights Act that the Supreme Court effectively eliminated by a 5-to-4 vote in 2013 in Shelby County v. Holder.The provision, the law’s Section 5, required states with a history of discrimination to obtain federal approval before changing voting procedures. In the Shelby County decision, the court ruled that the formula for deciding which states were covered violated the Constitution because it was based on outdated data.“Congress — if it is to divide the states — must identify those jurisdictions to be singled out on a basis that makes sense in light of current conditions,” Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. wrote for the majority.The John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, named for the civil rights leader who served in the House for more than three decades until his death last year, responds to that invitation by updating the coverage formula. Whether the Supreme Court — which has become more conservative since 2013 — would uphold the new formula and allow Section 5 to be restored is an open question, but the Shelby County decision at least allows Congress to try.Similarly, the court’s precedents suggest that not all of the anticipated challenges to the much broader H.R. 1 would succeed.As a general matter, few doubt that Congress has broad authority to regulate congressional elections because of the elections clause of the Constitution.To be sure, the clause specifies that “the times, places and manner of holding elections for senators and representatives shall be prescribed in each state by the legislature thereof.”The clause’s next phrase, though, allows federal lawmakers to override most of the power granted to state legislatures: “But the Congress may at any time by law make or alter such regulations, except as to the places of choosing senators.”The elections clause, supplemented by other constitutional provisions, Professor Stephanopoulos wrote in an article to be published in the journal Constitutional Commentary, means that “even the bill’s most controversial elements lie within Congress’s electoral authority, and Congress could actually reach considerably further, if it were so inclined.”But he acknowledged that there was controversy over the sweep of the provision. In a majority opinion in 2013, Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in an aside that the clause “empowers Congress to regulate how federal elections are held, but not who may vote in them.” That statement was in tension with the controlling opinion in a 1970 decision that allowed Congress to lower the minimum voting age in congressional elections to 18 from 21.The Supreme Court justices last month. The court has become more conservative since 2013, when it effectively eliminated a key provision of the Voting Rights Act.Erin Schaff/The New York TimesIf the statement from Justice Scalia is followed, it would raise questions about language in H.R. 1 that seeks to restore voting rights to people with felony convictions who have completed their sentences in states that would otherwise disenfranchise them.Several scholars said the provision might be vulnerable to a legal challenge. “That’s probably the most obvious red flag,” said Franita Tolson, a law professor at the University of Southern California.The Constitution grants Congress considerably less authority over presidential elections than congressional ones, allowing it to set only the timing. But some Supreme Court opinions have said the two kinds of authority are comparable.The bill’s requirement that states create independent commissions to draw congressional districts could also lead to litigation. Such commissions were upheld by a 5-to-4 vote in 2015 in Arizona State Legislature v. Arizona Independent Redistricting Commission.Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, writing for the majority, said Arizona voters were entitled “to address the problem of partisan gerrymandering — the drawing of legislative district lines to subordinate adherents of one political party and entrench a rival party in power.”With changes in the makeup of the Supreme Court since then, the Arizona precedent might be vulnerable, said Travis Crum, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis.“In litigation over the 2020 election, several justices — including Justice Brett Kavanaugh — questioned the validity of that precedent,” Professor Crum said. “Given the possibility that the court might overturn that decision in the near future, it is even more imperative that Congress step in and mandate the use of independent redistricting commissions for congressional districts.”In dissent in the Arizona case, Chief Justice Roberts wrote that the Constitution specified that only state legislatures had the power to draw congressional maps. Four years later, though, writing for the majority in rejecting a role for federal courts in addressing partisan gerrymandering, he wrote about independent commissions created by ballot measures with seeming approval and said Congress also had a role to play, citing an earlier version of H.R. 1.Representative John Lewis of Georgia outside the Supreme Court in 2013. A voting bill named for him seeks to restore enforcement of Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, after the court effectively eliminated it.Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesThe provision in H.R. 1 establishing a public financing system appears to be consistent with current Supreme Court precedentsIn 2011, by a 5-to-4 vote, the court struck down a different Arizona law, which provided escalating matching funds to participating candidates based on their opponents’ spending. But Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority in the case, Arizona Free Enterprise Club v. Bennett, indicated that more routine public financing systems remained a valid constitutional option.“We do not today call into question the wisdom of public financing as a means of funding political candidacy,” Chief Justice Roberts wrote. “That is not our business.”Some of the disclosure requirements in H.R. 1 have drawn objections from across the ideological spectrum. The American Civil Liberties Union has said that it supports disclosures tied to “express advocacy” of a candidate’s election or defeat. The bill goes further, though, requiring disclosures in connection with policy debates that refer to candidates.That measure, two A.C.L.U. lawyers wrote in The Washington Post in March, “could directly interfere with the ability of many to engage in political speech about causes that they care about and that impact their lives by imposing new and onerous disclosure requirements on nonprofits committed to advancing those causes.”“When a group is advocating policy changes outside the mainstream,” they continued, “they need privacy protections to be able to speak freely and without fear of reprisal.”The Citizens United decision in 2010 upheld the disclosure requirements before it by an 8-to-1 vote, but a pending Supreme Court case, American for Prosperity v. Bonta, might alter the constitutional calculus.Professor McGinnis said he also questioned a provision in the bill that required leaders of organizations to say they stood by the messages in political advertisements. “This seems to me to be eating up airtime without any real justification and subjecting people to harassment,” he said.He also took issue with the bill’s requirement that presidential candidates disclose their tax returns, saying Congress cannot add qualifications to who can run for president beyond those set out in the Constitution: that candidates be natural-born citizens, residents for 14 years and at least 35 years old.A 1995 Supreme Court decision rejecting an attempt by Arkansas to impose term limits on its congressional representatives appears to support the view that lawmakers cannot alter the constitutional requirements.Even if every one of the objections to the bill discussed in this article were to prevail in court, most of the law would survive. “Part of why the attack on H.R. 1 is unlikely to be successful in the end is that the law is not a single coherent structure the way Obamacare was,” Professor Stephanopoulos said. “It’s a hundred different proposals, all packaged together.”“The Roberts court would dislike on policy grounds almost the entire law,” he added. “But I think even this court would end up upholding most — big, big swaths — of the law. It would still leave the most important election bill in American history intact even after the court took its pound of flesh.”Nicholas Fandos More

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      House Republicans Have Had Enough of Liz Cheney’s Truth-Telling

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      G.O.P. House members are plotting a fresh bid to dethrone Ms. Cheney from her leadership post. Her transgression: continued repudiation of Donald J. Trump and his false election claims.WASHINGTON — The first time defenders of Donald J. Trump came for Representative Liz Cheney, for the offense of having voted to impeach him, fellow Republicans closed ranks to save her leadership post, with Representative Kevin McCarthy boasting that their “big tent” party had enough room for both the former president and a stalwart critic.Evidently, not anymore.Just three months after she beat back a no-confidence vote by lopsided margins, Ms. Cheney of Wyoming, the No. 3 House Republican, is facing a far more potent challenge that appears increasingly likely to end in her ouster from leadership. This time, Mr. McCarthy, the minority leader, is encouraging the effort to replace her.Her transgression, colleagues say: Ms. Cheney’s continued public criticism of Mr. Trump, her denunciation of his lies about a stolen election and her demands that the G.O.P. tell the truth about how his supporters assaulted democracy during the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol.The turnabout reflects anew the passion with which Republicans have embraced Mr. Trump and the voters who revere him, and how willing many in the party are to perpetuate — or at least tolerate — falsehoods about the 2020 election that he has continued to spread.What began as a battle over the party’s future after the violent end to the Trump presidency has collapsed into a one-sided pile-on by Team Trump, with critics like Ms. Cheney, the scion of a storied Republican family and the lone woman in her party’s House leadership, ostracized or moving toward the exits.The latest test for Ms. Cheney could come as soon as next week, when a growing group of Republicans is planning a fresh bid to dethrone her, with Mr. McCarthy’s blessing. Many of her colleagues are now so confident that it will succeed that they are openly discussing who will replace Ms. Cheney.The tensions escalated on Tuesday, when Mr. McCarthy went on Mr. Trump’s favorite news program, “Fox & Friends,” to question whether Ms. Cheney could effectively carry out her role as the party’s top messenger. (Beforehand, he told a Fox reporter, “I’ve had it with her,” and “I’ve lost confidence,” according to a leaked recording of the exchange published by Axios.)“I have heard from members concerned about her ability to carry out the job as conference chair, to carry out the message,” Mr. McCarthy said during the portion of the interview that aired. “We all need to be working as one, if we’re able to win the majority.”With onetime allies closing in, Ms. Cheney, known for her steely temperament, has only dug in harder. Minutes after Mr. McCarthy’s TV hit, she sent her barbed reply through a spokesman, effectively suggesting that the minority leader and Republicans moving against her were complicit in Mr. Trump’s dissembling.“This is about whether the Republican Party is going to perpetuate lies about the 2020 election and attempt to whitewash what happened on Jan. 6,” said Jeremy Adler, the spokesman. “Liz will not do that. That is the issue.”One of the few Republican voices willing to rise to Ms. Cheney’s defense was Senator Mitt Romney of Utah, who has himself come under attack from his party for his unrepentant criticism of Mr. Trump — even getting booed at the Utah Republican Party convention on Saturday.“Every person of conscience draws a line beyond which they will not go: Liz Cheney refuses to lie,” Mr. Romney wrote on Twitter. “As one of my Republican Senate colleagues said to me following my impeachment vote: ‘I wouldn’t want to be a member of a group that punished someone for following their conscience.’”Many House Republicans insist they have no problem with Ms. Cheney’s vote to impeach Mr. Trump, which she described as a vote of conscience. Nor, they say, are they bothered by her neoconservative policy positions, which skew — like those of her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney — toward a hawkishness that is at odds with the “America First” slant of the party that Mr. Trump cemented.But they fear that Ms. Cheney’s refusal to stop criticizing Mr. Trump or condemning the events of Jan. 6 could weaken the party’s message going into the 2022 midterm elections, when they hope to portray Democrats as big-government socialists so villainous they should be voted out of the majority. It has also infuriated Mr. Trump.Many, including Mr. McCarthy, had hoped that after surviving the February vote of no confidence, Ms. Cheney, as an elected leader, would make like the rest of the party and simply move on.Instead, she has doubled down and at times turned her fire on colleagues. The final straw for many came last week in Orlando, where Republicans gathered for their annual policy retreat in hopes of putting on a show of unity.Ms. Cheney told Punchbowl News that she would campaign in Wyoming — where she faces a primary challenge — defending her impeachment vote “every day of the week.” She told reporters that any lawmaker who led the bid to invalidate President Biden’s electoral victory in Congress should be disqualified from running for president. And she broke with leading Republicans when she said a proposed independent commission to investigate the Jan. 6 riot should focus on the attack on the Capitol by a pro-Trump mob, rather than scrutinizing violence by antifa and Black Lives Matter, as Mr. McCarthy and other Republicans have demanded.Representative Kevin McCarthy has questioned whether Ms. Cheney can effectively carry out her role as the party’s top messenger.Anna Moneymaker for The New York TimesA few days later, she drew attacks from the right for fist-bumping Mr. Biden at his speech before a joint session of Congress, and took to Twitter to defend herself for greeting the president “in a civil, respectful & dignified way.”“We’re not sworn enemies,” she wrote. “We’re Americans.”On Monday, after Mr. Trump issued a statement calling the 2020 election “fraudulent” and “THE BIG LIE,” Ms. Cheney quickly tweeted her rebuttal, writing that anyone who made such claims was “poisoning our democratic system.”Some Republicans privately likened her performance to picking at a scab, and many of Mr. Trump’s allies saw it as an opening to try again to depose her.“Liz has attempted (is FAILING badly) to divide our party,” Representative Lance Gooden, Republican of Texas, wrote on Twitter on Tuesday, emulating Mr. Trump’s caustic Twitter style. “Trump is still the LEADER of the GOP, Liz! I look forward to her being removed SOON!”Ms. Cheney’s troubles chart a rapid shift for the Republican Party in the few months since Mr. Trump left Washington. Early on, she was part of a small but influential group of Republicans that included Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the minority leader, and condemned Mr. Trump’s role in stoking the riot with false claims of a stolen election. But many of those lawmakers have since gone quiet, leaving Ms. Cheney, who once was enthusiastically spoken of as a future speaker or president, isolated.Ms. Cheney declined through a spokesman to comment, and several of her allies in the House would not speak on the record in her defense, underscoring the fraught nature of the vote and the pessimism some of them feel about her chances of surviving another challenge. A spokeswoman for Representative Adam Kinzinger of Illinois, another Republican who voted to impeach Mr. Trump and has been a leading critic of the former president, said in a statement that the congressman “unequivocally supports Liz Cheney for conference chair.”Those who know her best say privately that Ms. Cheney’s predicament reflects both her principles and her personality, including a stubborn streak that sometimes prompts her to act against her self-interest. One ally who has been exasperated by her in recent months described her actions as classic Liz Cheney: She will always do what she thinks is right, the Republican said on Tuesday, but she will just never stop to think she’s wrong.With Ms. Cheney hemorrhaging support, Republicans have already begun cycling through names of possible replacements for a post traditionally seen as a steppingstone to the top party positions. Mindful of the optics of replacing the only woman in leadership with another man, Republicans are eyeing choosing a woman.The leading contender appears to be Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, a rising star in her fourth term who has long toiled to increase the number of women in the Republican ranks and has more recently become a fierce defender of Mr. Trump.Ms. Stefanik, 36, has begun reaching out to Republican lawmakers to gauge their support, according to two people familiar with the private conversations, and by Tuesday evening, one of her political aides was retweeting speculation that she would “make an outstanding conference chair.”Representative Guy Reschenthaler of Pennsylvania, a member of the Republican leadership who initially whipped votes for Ms. Cheney, said that he was counting potential votes for Ms. Stefanik and believed the job would be hers if she ran. Republicans have also floated Representative Jackie Walorski of Indiana as a possible alternative. As the top Republican on the Ethics Committee, Ms. Walorski this year successfully balanced the job of condemning Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s past conspiratorial statements while arguing she should not be kicked off her committees. More