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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

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      The Women Who Paved the Way for Marjorie Taylor Greene

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storyOpinionSupported byContinue reading the main storyThe Women Who Paved the Way for Marjorie Taylor GreeneShe’s the latest descendant in a lineage of Republican women who embrace a boffo radicalism.Opinion ColumnistFeb. 7, 2021Credit…Susan Walsh/Associated PressWhen I was coming of age as a journalist, it was an article of faith — and political science — that female Republican politicians subdued their party’s excesses. It was a measurable phenomenon, even: Republican women voted to the left of their male counterparts in Congress.But as the G.O.P. began to radicalize, becoming not just a small-government party but an anti-government party — a government delegitimization party — this taming effect ceased to be. Moderates of both sexes cleared out of the building. A new swarm of firebrands rushed in. Not only did female Republican elected officials become every bit as conservative as their male counterparts; they began, in some cases, to personify the party’s most outlandish tendencies.This is the thought I keep returning to when I think about Marjorie Taylor Greene: That there is something depressingly familiar about her. She’s the latest descendant in a lineage of Republican women who embrace a boffo radicalism, who delight in making trouble and in causing offense.In her own freshman class, Greene has an outrageous comrade in Lauren Boebert, who once said she hoped QAnon was real and tried, post Jan. 6, to walk onto the House floor with her Glock.Before Greene and Boebert, there was Representative Marsha Blackburn, now a senator, who declared a preference for the title “Congressman” and co-sponsored a 2009 bill requiring presidential candidates to provide copies of their original birth certificates. (In 2019, her first year in the Senate, she was deemed its most conservative member by GovTrack.) There was Representative Michele Bachmann, who went on national television and repeated a story about the HPV vaccine supposedly causing “mental retardation”; openly fretted that President Barack Obama wanted to do away with the dollar; and called herself “a foreign correspondent on enemy lines,” reporting on the nefarious doings of the Democrats.There was Sarah Palin, who spellbound the base with her vaudevillian ad-libbing, sassy anti-intellectualism, denunciations of the lamestream media and laffy-taffy stretching of the facts. “She would say things that are simply not true, or things that were picked up from the internet,” Steve Schmidt, a former top adviser to John McCain’s 2008 campaign, told “Frontline.”Even when I was a young reporter covering Congress, the Newt Gingrich revolution ushered in a number of outrageous women who thrilled to their roles as troublemakers and conspiracists. North Carolina’s Sue Myrick wrote the foreword to “Muslim Mafia: Inside the Secret Underworld That’s Conspiring to Islamize America.” Helen Chenoweth, like Blackburn, asked to be called “Congressman”; held an endangered-sockeye-salmon fund-raising bake; and said armed wildlife agents in black helicopters were invading her home state, Idaho.Michele BachmannCredit…Chris O’Meara/Associated PressMarsha BlackburnCredit…Pool photo by Stefani ReynoldsSue MyrickCredit…Doug Mills/The New York TimesElise StefanikCredit…Erik S Lesser/EPA, via ShutterstockYou could argue that these women were in a better position to embody anti-government, populist sentiment than men. A decade ago, the Republican pollster Linda DiVall told The Atlantic that voters were more inclined to think female politicians “won’t be in the back room dealing with special interests.”Now recall Sarah Palin at the 2008 convention, railing in her Wasilla twang against “the good-old boys” brokering their secret deals. Recall Michele Bachmann in 2011, telling Jake Tapper, “What people see in me is that I’m a real person, I’m authentic.” And think of Marjorie Taylor Greene in these last couple of years, yammering on about the nefarious plots of the deep state, Jewish lasers and false flags. She’s here to tell you what’s going on in that back room — and that she’s going to put an end to it.After the 2018 midterm elections, when 10 Republican congresswomen lost their seats, New York’s Elise Stefanik (once a reasonable human being, now another Harvard Graduate for Sedition) told Republican leaders that the party had to make electing women a priority. Kevin McCarthy, the House minority leader, agreed to help; outside groups and Stefanik’s own PAC did, too. Their efforts worked. Eighteen new Republican women showed up to the House this January.But in order to get elected, those women needed to win their primaries. And to win their primaries, they needed to present themselves as every bit as tough and conservative (socially and otherwise) as their male primary opponents — and to win over a subgroup of the electorate that historically has been less inclined to vote for women in the first place.This, in turn, led to what I think is an interesting paradox: These women are playing simultaneously into male Republican stereotypes of power — loving their guns, defending their country from the migrant hordes — and stereotypes of femininity, to reassure the Republican faithful that they’re still real women. Think of Palin, presenting herself as a mama grizzly with a shotgun. Motherhood was front and center in her self-presentation. Ditto for Lauren Boebert (mother of four, loves her Glock). Ditto for Bachmann (mother of five, partial to AR-15s).Greene loves her guns, too — so much that she was willing to harass a survivor of a school shooting, which may not have qualified as maternal behavior, now that I think of it.Hmm. Maybe we’ve rounded a corner. Maybe any kind of behavior from Republican female politicians now goes.Either way: A number of these politicians, including Palin and Bachmann, crashed and burned. But what if their evanescent political lives paved the way for more powerful male politicians?Corrine McConnaughy, a research scholar in politics at Princeton, stopped me in my tracks by asking whether Sarah Palin’s repeated complaints about the elite media made it easier for Donald Trump to frame himself as a victim of Fake News. Better for a woman to blaze the way on victimhood first, right, lest it be seen as unmanly? (Yes, Nixon also complained that the media were out to get him. But mainly in private.)Sarah PalinCredit…Mark Hirsch/Getty ImagesMcConnaughy didn’t know the answer. Neither do I. But it’s a great question. In hindsight, it certainly seems clear that folksy, populist, prevaricating Palin — a tabloid fixture and reality television star — cleared the way for Trump.Perhaps the media bear a tiny bit of responsibility for the coverage Greene is getting. We’re going through terrible outrage withdrawal. (“Have you seen CNN’s ratings recently?” Dan Senor, once an adviser to Mitt Romney, asked me not long ago.) So here is Greene, offering us a bottomless Mary-Poppins-carpet-bag of old videos that spew hate and derangement. She’s our methadone.Then again, she truly is monstrous.You can also ask whether unconscious gender bias plays a role in the coverage of Greene. Television loves a brassy hot mess. Greene’s despicable words and actions deserved censure and punishment, certainly. But it’s not as if there aren’t a ton of male Republican kooks in this Congress, too: Louie Gohmert, Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, Mo Brooks … the list is long.Me, I remain fixated on the new breed of Republican female politician that Greene continues to represent. As the political scientists Monica C. Schneider and Angela L. Bos have argued, we don’t yet have, as a culture, a firm idea of how a female elected official looks or acts, though we have stereotypes galore for male politicians (and men and women more generally).Hillary Clinton’s supporters were fond of the adage, “the future is female.” That may one day be true. But we should brace ourselves. That future may be quite different from the one we were expecting. The future often is.The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      How New York’s Representatives Voted After the Capitol Riot

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