The most controversial Republican in Congress will not win re-election to her House seat, but there’s a growing number of Democrats and Republicans who actually believes she should run for president.
Mind you, she wouldn’t have a prayer of succeeding. But the state of American politics and the Republican Party is so toxic that the prospect of Liz Cheney becoming a serious presidential candidate is not as far-fetched as it sounds.
Her high-profile role on the Jan. 6 Committee has given her a national platform to spout her warnings of doom and gloom about “insurrections,” which, in turn, has given her access to a nationwide base of donors.
Those donors have bankrolled her candidacy to the tune of $10.1 million — swamping her Trump-backed challenger, Harriet Hageman’s, $2 million raised so far.
What’s significant about the donors is that they ain’t from Wyoming.
The problem is that much of this money is coming from out of state. As Open Secrets reported, Texas donors contributed the most money in 2021, with the second-highest amount from deep-blue California. Last year, Cheney received more money from Democratic states like New York and Connecticut than her home state.
Even when she loses in the GOP primary — she’s trailing by 30 points at this point in the campaign — she’ll have a national base of big-money donors who might see Cheney as a GOP savior.
Robert Reich, Obama’s Treasury Secretary, sees an opening for Cheney.
It will be impossible to reunite this nation without a leader who is the exact opposite of Trump — driven not by narcissism but by a passion for the rule of law and the Constitution — someone who has staked everything on opposing Trump’s demagogic authoritarianism, someone with huge stores of courage and integrity.
Since the attack on the Capitol, Liz Cheney has demonstrated more courage and integrity than any other politician in America. Democratic lawmakers have opposed Trump’s Big Lie, to be sure, but most knew they wouldn’t pay a price for their opposition. Cheney knew she would pay a price — and she has.
The NeverTrump wing of the GOP would have no trouble coalescing behind Liz Cheney. But if she can’t even win a House race in Wyoming, the most Republican state in the union, where would she be able to break through?
In truth, there may be a boomlet for Cheney in the national media. After all, she’s the liberal media’s kind of gal, trashing her own party for the purpose of self-aggrandizement and self-promotion.
And Cheney is no paragon of virtue.
On the mass surveillance conducted by the government against, well, everyone, revealed to the world by Edward Snowden in 2013, Liz is definitely on the side of the government snoops and firmly against the whistleblower whom she considers a traitor. Never mind that a federal judge ruled that the mass surveillance Snowden revealed was illegal.
Cheney didn’t crow about the rule of law after that court decision in 2020.
Indeed, when it comes to the war on terror and the George W. Bush-era brand that she and her father have spent their lives defending — from drone strikes to black sites to Gitmo — Cheneys can regularly be found outside the bounds of the law as defined by our courts and public conversations about the legality and morality of such practices.
Oh. You mean that rule of law?
Trump will have a fight on his hands if he runs for president in 2024. But he’s not going to get a fight from Liz Cheney, who will be long gone and nearly forgotten by the time the 2024 primaries begin.
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