President Joe Biden thinks the relatively quick ouster of Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) from the number three spot in Republican House leadership will provide him an opening of some sort. At least this time, it is a Democrat “seizing” something, according to the Washington Post:
President Biden is seizing on this week’s dramatic moment of Republican discord by inviting a parade of officeholders from both parties to grapple with major national challenges, hoping to portray himself as working to solve the country’s problems in contrast to the Republicans’ internal bloodletting.
So, four states have declared a state of emergency due to gas shortages, Israel and Hamas are on the verge of war, and the Consumer Price Index is up 4.2%, the most significant jump since 2008. This news follows a horrible jobs report last week with the biggest miss in decades, and record numbers of illegal immigrants are still flowing over the border with no end in sight. And the Biden White House chooses now to leak their super-slick plan to use Cheney’s ouster as cover to push their radical agenda.
After you stop laughing, look at the wording in that graph. Wednesday’s vote was a “dramatic moment of Republican discord.” It was only dramatic for the DNC press corps, who have been breathlessly covering the fact that the Republican caucus would remove Cheney. Their fawning coverage is a baseless attempt to tie Cheney’s ouster to her vote to impeach President Trump after January 6th. Republicans voted on Cheney on February 3, shortly after the impeachment vote. She retained her position by more than a 2-1 margin, and the other nine Republicans who joined her suffered no consequences in the House.
The bottom line is that Cheney cannot stop looking in the rearview mirror. She is obsessed with President Trump and his claims of election fraud. Cheney has even adopted the left-wing phrase “the Big Lie” to describe Trump’s claims. The only big lie about 2020 is that it was a secure election free from any interference.
Democrats filed lawsuits all over the country to relax election security laws, many times in violation of state law. There was unprecedented absentee and mail-in balloting combined with thousands of unmonitored drop boxes. And hundreds of millions of dollars were shoveled into swing-state urban districts through the Center for Technology and Civic Life to turn them into Biden turnout machines. Then counting stopped and started while batches of uncounted ballots magically appeared for weeks.
No thinking Trump voter was buying the Dominion voting machine theory in the absence of extraordinary evidence. Those who alleged that Dominion was compromised never provided that evidence. However, discounting concerns about the 2020 election runs contrary to admissions from those who engineered the extraordinary changes to the process. Following the inauguration of Joe Biden, they couldn’t wait to tell their story to Molly Ball at Time. She used the words “shadow campaign” and “conspiracy” to describe what happened before and after the election. Cheney denying what many Americans know happened is completely abandoning the base. Even Ball said:
To the President, something felt amiss. “It was all very, very strange,” Trump said on Dec. 2. “Within days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner, even while many key states were still being counted.”
In a way, Trump was right.
If this had become public before Inauguration Day, January 6th might never have happened. America should blame the participants in the “shadow campaign” every bit as much as they blame Trump. There were enough oddities from election night forward for a small number of gullible people to be manipulated by bad actors who filled in the gap with nonsense. One could conclude that the delayed explanation served just that purpose.
Cheney’s fellow travelers are ready to move on. Those who voted to impeach or convict Trump during the second attempt are ready to move on. They are focusing on uniting behind Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Kevin McCarthy to thwart President Biden’s radical agenda and win back both chambers in 2022. Cheney continuing to go on anti-Trump rants in print and on cable news does not serve either of these goals.
Because here is the dirty little secret: Cheney voted overwhelmingly for President Trump’s agenda in Congress. In fact, she voted for more Trump priorities than her likely replacement Representative Elsie Stefanik (R-N.Y.) did. For Trump’s base and most of the 2020 coalition he amassed, which added 11 million more voters, the agenda was the thing. Smart Republicans have figured that out and are moving forward on that premise. Cheney is just a little too fond of the strange new respect she is getting from the legacy media to get the message.
Biden thinking that this realignment in the Republican Party will provide him any opening is misplaced optimism. It will actually unite the caucus and eliminate the constant distractions that Cheney’s feud with Trump caused. Ultimately, it will be up to the voters of Wyoming to decide if her terminal-stage TDS serves their interests in November of 2022. They probably won’t be reading her editorials in the Washington Post or watching her rail on CNN. However, we are all watching how the Biden administration will handle the foreign and domestic crises they have created in just over 100 days.
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