Editor’s note: Dean Obeidallah, a former lawyer, is the host of the daily SiriusXM radio program “The Dean Obeidallah Show” and a columnist for The Daily Beast. follow him @DeanObeidallah. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. See more opinion on CNN.
CNN
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Liz Cheney didn’t hold back as she slammed both former President Donald Trump and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy in an interview this weekend at the Texas Tribune Festival. Cheney, who has vowed to campaign against non-election candidates in the November election, said if Trump becomes the 2024 GOP presidential nominee, then “I won’t be a Republican.”
Trump supporters may dismiss Cheney as someone whose words carry little weight after she was roundly beaten in her House primary in August. But keep in mind that the representative from Wyoming still won nearly 30% of the vote against her Trump-backed opponent.
If that same 30% of Republicans nationwide heed Cheney’s advice and reject Trumpism in the November election, it will be next to impossible for Republicans to win the House of Representatives. And if a similar percentage rejects the former president, his chances of securing the Republican White House nomination in 2024 in a crowded field will be drastically reduced – and that would be a good thing for those who support keeping America in as a democratic republic.
During his Saturday interview, Cheney again sounded the alarm about Trump’s efforts to nullify the 2020 election, sharing that “one of the things that surprised me the most about my work within this committee (of the House of January 6) is the sophistication of the plan”. was that Donald Trump was involved and overseeing every step of the process.
Cheney also denounced Trump’s refusal on Jan. 6 to issue a public statement urging the crowd to halt the attack until more than three hours had passed, ignoring urgent pleas from congressional leaders, who, according to her, “were pleading with him, ‘Please tell the crowd to go home.” She then posed a question directly to the audience: “Just put politics aside for a minute and do you think, ‘What kind of human being does that?”
A life member of the GOP, Cheney then promised the crowd, “I’m going to do everything I can to make sure he’s not the nominee,” adding, “And if he’s the nominee, I won’t be a Republican.”
What a refreshing contrast to the likes of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who, in the Senate in February 2021 after Trump’s second impeachment trial, criticized Trump for “causing” the Jan. 6 attack and for his “honest dereliction of duty”. But just months ago, McConnell said if Trump was the GOP’s choice in 2024, “I have an obligation to support my party’s nominee.”
And Cheney wasn’t done. When asked if McCarthy should be the next House Speaker, she emphatically replied, “No.”
“Every moment when our testing moment came, and Kevin had to make a decision about what he was going to do, he made the decision politically easy for him – or politically expedient – instead of what the country needed” , Cheney said. .
Noting that the Speaker of the House is next in line after the Vice President, she said what the country needs in a public servant “who is going to be this close to the presidency” is “someone which is faithful to the Constitution”.
Cheney couldn’t be more right about McCarthy. This is the same person who, days after the Jan. 6 attack, stood on the floor of the House and lambasted Trump, saying, “The President bears responsibility” for the attack on the Capitol. “He should have reported the crowd immediately when he saw what was happening.”
But just two weeks later, McCarthy gave us a profile of cowardice when he visited Mar-a-Lago, where he posed for a photo with Trump and kissed his ring. Apparently calculating that he would need the support of Trump’s base to win in 2022, McCarthy put his own ambition to become Speaker of the House over his concerns for our republic.
What makes Cheney’s remarks potentially persuasive to a significant subset of Republicans is that she is a staunch conservative and was a strong Trump supporter before the events of Jan. 6.
In a July 2020 Fox News interview, she made it clear that the top priority for her and her House GOP caucus was to make sure Joe Biden didn’t win, saying she supported Trump’s agenda “something like 97% of the time”.
But to his credit, Cheney began speaking publicly about the potential danger Trump posed to our republic — even before the 2020 election. We saw it in September 2020, when Trump refused to commit to accepting the election results. election if he loses, saying instead that we’ll have to “see what happens”.
In response, Cheney took to Twitter, writing, “The peaceful transfer of power is enshrined in our Constitution and fundamental to the survival of our Republic. American leaders take an oath to the Constitution. We will honor this oath.
Clearly today, Cheney has become a fierce critic of Trump and other election deniers. In fact, during her interview on Saturday, she promised to campaign against Kari Lake, the GOP gubernatorial candidate who refuses the Arizona election and whom Trump has endorsed.
But we know that Cheney is not alone in the GOP in steadfastly holding her conservative values while firmly supporting the rule of law and rejecting Trump and the MAGA wing of the Republican Party.
The hope now is that the same type of Republicans who backed Cheney in his primary defeat can be found across the country in the November election. If they choose country over party, they will play an important role in protecting our Constitution and our democratic republic from those who pose a threat to both.
