But shed no tears for Liz Cheney. Her star has never shone more brightly.
Cheney is the breakout star of this summer’s blockbuster TV series: the hearings of the House committee investigating the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. As the vice chair and one of only two Republicans with the mettle to serve on the committee, Cheney has been granted the lead in hearings that have methodically and dramatically revealed the role that Trump and his sidekicks played in the violent attempt to overturn the election of Joe Biden.
Cheney’s forthrightness evokes a time when patriotism (occasionally) trumped partisanship and officials (sometimes) worked across the aisle for the greater good.
Her bravery in the face of overt hostility has made this conservative’s conservative — the daughter of the man liberals deemed a political Darth Vader — the darling of the left. Democrats are hanging on her every word, delighted to the point of giddiness that she has become the point person in what might well be the most consequential congressional panel since Watergate.
Now, as she faces a potential loss, Cheney is being touted as a future presidential candidate.
On Friday, she extended her broad opposition to Biden’s signature initiatives, voting against legislation to combat global warming, decrease the cost of prescription drugs, raise taxes on wealthy corporations and reduce the federal deficit. Democrats passed the bill without a single Republican vote.
It seems highly unlikely then, that the feminists who extol her fearlessness in the face of the nation’s biggest bully would catapult to the White House a candidate who has tried to thwart them at almost every turn. Ditto the progressives who love her heroism but loathe her policies. Perhaps some moderate Republican women and men would back her, but they are little more than a fading memory in a party now dominated by Trump loyalists.
That leaves conservatives, the reliable voters who elected her in years past, who elected her father, Dick Cheney, to the seat she now occupies and stuck with him when he served as George W. Bush’s contentious vice president. To win the GOP nomination for president (or for any other elected office), Cheney needs the conservative voters of her party’s base. But those most Republican of voters are not Cheney people anymore. They are Trumpists.
Could she win them back? Over Trump’s dead body.
Still, don’t write off Cheney just yet. She has no shortage of courage or chutzpah. She’s a formidable adversary.