(LifeSiteNews) — Back in 2013, when Liz Cheney decided to make her first foray into electoral politics by launching a campaign for the U.S. Senate in Wyoming, she announced her plans in a Facebook post that was geotagged not to Cheyenne, or Casper, or even her supposed residence of Wilson, but rather to McLean, Virginia.
That’s because, in spite of her blue jeans and cowboy boots, she didn’t really live in Wyoming at all; she hadn’t since she was a child, when her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, moved back to the state to campaign for a seat in Congress after several years working in both the Nixon and Ford administrations.
As an adult, though (and before ever getting elected to Congress, herself), Cheney had followed in daddy’s footsteps, making a life, living, and home for herself in the heart of our nation’s swamplands.
After stints as a lawyer for both the massive New York-based White & Case firm and the International Finance Corporation of the World Bank Group, she was appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs by George W. Bush (daddy’s boss) and then Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs after the Bush-Cheney ticket snagged a second term in 2004.
When the president and vice president retired to their respective homes in Texas and Wyoming four years later, Liz stayed behind in D.C., forming a pro-Bush (Cheney) Doctrine think tank called “Keep America Safe” alongside known neocon William Kristol, in a formal display of their affection for, among other things, needless interventionism, the lethal conflicts that result from it, and the unsuccessful yet costly nation-building efforts that follow.
As American as apple pie.
When that went up in flames, Cheney’s thirst to stay relevant on the political scene reached new heights, culminating in the purchase of a $1.9 million house in Wilson, Wyoming and, just one year later, her left-field challenge to popular incumbent Republican Mike Enzi for his seat in the U.S. Senate – confirmed by the aforementioned Facebook announcement posted, instead, from 10 miles outside of Washington, D.C. (and 2,070 miles away from Wilson).
This, however, would not be the final embarrassment for Cheney’s ill-fated campaign, which, once thought to be a credible undertaking given her familial status and establishment bona fides, saw her surprisingly fail to raise the funds necessary to compete and gain little traction against Enzi as a result.
She exited the race on January 6, 2014 – more than seven months before the primary and exactly seven years before what would unquestionably mark the beginning of the end of Liz Cheney’s tenure in elected office.
When she finally did make it Congress in 2017 as Wyoming’s lone member of the U.S. House of Representatives (the same seat her father held for a decade), though, Cheney was embraced by the Republican hierarchy on Capitol Hill, which quickly moved to select her for House Republican Conference Chair when the position was vacated on the first day of her second term two years later, setting the stage for what should’ve been a meteoric rise in congressional GOP leadership.
And yet, today, Wyoming’s Congresswoman finds herself hurtling toward a fast-approaching, self-inflicted, near-definite, downright messy conclusion to her roller-coaster of a political career.
So how, then, did Liz Cheney manage to go from “rising Republican star” to implosive party pariah and pathetic left-wing panderer in just three years’ time?
Once considered a conservative stalwart during her comparatively brief tenure in the House, the hawkish Cheney’s voting record actually synced up with the Trump agenda nearly 93% of the time during his term despite some expected divergences on foreign policy.
That said, she remained supportive of notable legislative efforts to repeal Obamacare (which was sunk by John McCain in the Senate) and reform the tax code, among other things. She even went so far as to describe the conspiratorial, anti-Trump text messages exchanged between FBI officials Peter Strzok (who spearheaded the agency’s investigation into the Russian collusion hoax) and Lisa Page as a potential “coup” that “could well be treason.”
And yet, these flagrant deep state transgressions against the then-sitting president of the United States seemed to be suddenly forgotten when Cheney, apparently knowing full well that the left would stop at nothing to take down Trump (even after they insisted Joe Biden fairly defeated him in the “most secure election in history”), joined her Democrat colleagues and jumped on the January 6th hysteria bandwagon in the aftermath of the disturbance at the Capitol in 2021.
Cheney, who’d been criticized by conservative House members just months earlier for, among other things, vocalizing disapproval of the Trump administration’s response to the outbreak of Covid-19 along with support for Dr. Anthony Fauci, had abruptly stopped her insistence that she’d been a pro-Trump legislator and immediately began parading nonsensical propaganda crafted by Democrat politicians and media commentators that the 45th president had incited an “insurrection.”
“There is no question that the President formed the mob, the President incited the mob, the President addressed the mob. He lit the flame,” she tweeted just hours later, cementing her newfound status in the “resistance” after months of clamoring for acceptance from her party’s pro-MAGA base.
Unsurprisingly, Cheney followed up her professed outrage with a useless vote to impeach Trump – who was slated to leave office in a matter of days – just one week later, calling his manufactured role in the storming of the Capitol a “betrayal … of his office and his oath to the Constitution.”
Trump was, ultimately, acquitted – for a second time – in the Senate. Cheney, in a much more figurative sense, was, as well, when, on February 3rd, she survived the equivalent of a no-confidence vote among the House Republican caucus, which voted to keep her as Conference Chair by a margin of 145-61.
She fared worse in her “home” state three days later, with the Wyoming Republican Party voting 56-8 to censure Cheney over her impeachment vote, and backing resolutions to withhold any future donations to her and calling on her to “immediately resign” from the House altogether.
But while Wyoming Republicans reaffirmed their conviction that “no evidence exists President Trump has ever called for a violent response to political opposition,” Cheney doubled down on repetitive lies to the contrary, continuously parading DNC-style talking points about an “attack on democracy” (in which, no less, the only life victim during said “attack” was one of the “attackers”) as a means to win favor with House Democrats who were already busy drumming up support for the creation of a January 6th Commission in the vein of the 9/11 Commission formed back in 2002.
And it was easy to see why: Over that same time period, Cheney had fallen out of favor with many of the same Republicans who voted just a few months earlier to have her remain in her leadership post, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who, by late April, with his No. 3 having gone fully rogue, had begun scouting potential replacements.
He formally backed New York’s Elise Stefanik in early May 9th and scheduled a new vote to remove Cheney from House GOP leadership on May 10th. This time, opposition to her continuing on was so immense that a voice vote was held, with the caucus overwhelmingly rejecting Cheney on May 12th and instating Stefanik on May 14th.
Exactly two weeks later, Republicans in the Senate blocked the creation of a January 6th commission, with Speaker Nancy Pelosi quickly moving to appoint a select committee in the House to investigate the matter instead. A resolution to approve its formation was passed in a 222-190 vote one month later, with the support of two House Republicans: Illinois’s known Never-Trumper Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney.
It came as little surprise then that, when it came time to select the committee’s members, Pelosi rejected two of McCarthy’s five recommendations from his caucus (all of whom, in some respect, sought to challenge the dubious results from certain states in the 2020 election). She instead appointed Cheney, who would become Vice Chair, and then Kinzinger, herself, resulting in the Republican leader’s tacit acknowledgment that this undertaking was little more than a politically-motivated witch hunt by withdrawing each of his selections.
What followed was a year’s worth of partisan crusades against the former president and his supporters with the ultimate end goal being to prevent Trump from seeking re-election in 2024 by sullying his public image further after two impeachments, a failed special counsel investigation, and years’ worth of organized opposition across both public and private sector entities failed to reduce his rock-solid support among an uncommonly immovable bloc of the American electorate.
In many respects, this was the straw that broke the camel’s back for Cheney, who now found herself (1) entirely ostracized from her party on Capitol Hill and utterly rejected by its pro-Trump base, and (2) a primary target not only for the still politically-inclined Trump going into 2022, but also for potential successors and voters alike in Wyoming, all of whom felt abandoned by the Congresswoman they chose to be their voice in Washington for three consecutive terms.
As conservatives, wary of splitting their vote among multiple alternatives, began their search for a single viable challenger to Cheney in 2022’s primary for her seat, the decision was largely made for them when Harriet Hageman, a trial attorney whose career has often focused on combating federal overreach with respect to the management of Wyoming’s natural resources, launched her own bid last September with the immediate backing of Trump, who called her a “very successful attorney” who will fight for the America First agenda and labeled Liz Cheney “warmonger,” “disloyal Republican,” and “Democrats’ number one provider of sound bites.”
In what is widely considered one of 2022’s most nationalized proxy races in the ongoing battle for heart and soul of the Republican Party between Trump’s insurgent “ultra MAGA” wing and yesteryear’s dynastic, wait-your-turn collection of ancient, elitist, limp-wristed neocons, Wyoming – a state with a population smaller than that of well over 100 individual counties across America – has taken center stage in this year’s midterms.
The final outcome, which regardless of formality (Democrats currently make up just 13.9% of all registered voters in Wyoming), seems to be destined for determination just a day from now on August 16th, when Cheney will finally face Hageman after nearly a year’s worth of campaigning.
That said, the wind has been steadily at Hageman’s back since she announced her campaign: Not only did she thoroughly horsewhip Cheney by a vote of 59-6 in a straw poll of Wyoming’s Republican State Committee members in the first major test of her candidacy’s strength back in January, she also found herself the benefactor of an unprecedented decision to invoke a provision of the Republican National Committee’s Rule 11, which prohibits the national GOP from financially backing any candidates before they advance to a general election, unless written consent is granted by their respective state’s three RNC members.
Wyoming GOP Chairman Frank Eathorne, National Committeeman Corey Steinmetz, and National Committeewoman Nina Webber did exactly that, signing a letter in support of Hageman on behalf of the state party on the grounds that Cheney was “working against the best interests of Republicans in Wyoming and nationwide.”
This came just four days after the RNC already voted to censure Cheney for her membership on the January 6th Committee, which was labeled a “Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens engaged in legitimate political discourse” in a pursuant resolution published by the GOP on February 4th.
Also criticized in the resolution was the committee’s “disregard for minority rights, traditional checks and balances, due process, and adherence to other precedent and rules of the U.S. House and which seem intent on advancing a political agenda to buoy the Democrat Party’s bleak prospects in the upcoming midterm elections.”
These events led to additional endorsements of Hageman from House GOP leaders Kevin McCarthy and Elise Stefanik (Cheney’s successor as Conference Chair) just days later, along with more than 100 of Cheney’s own colleagues in Congress who offered their own in the lead-up to the primary.
By contrast, Liz Cheney’s most notable endorsements have consisted of her father (who’s currently starring in a painfully awkward campaign ad airing on Fox News where he criticizes Trump more than he builds up his daughter), Nancy Pelosi (because nothing says “Republicans, please save my career” quite like the backing of America’s most statistically unpopular politician), and O.J. Simpson (we’ll just let that one speak for itself).
These points, among others, could explain why an exceedingly desperate Cheney – now firmly a woman without a country (or at least a party) – has sunk to a new low of practically begging registered Democrats to switch parties in time to vote for her in the Republican primary on Tuesday, with her campaign mailing instructions on how to do so.
(Wyoming allows voters to switch their party registration through their county clerk’s office up to 14 days before an election, or on the day of an election at their polling place).
But even if all 39,753 Wyoming Democrats acted in accordance with Cheney’s will, it still may not be enough to save her from the near-certain drubbing that awaits: With the primary looming tomorrow, the most recent survey of Wyoming Republican voters, conducted by the University of Wyoming, shows Hageman with a 29-point-advantage, trouncing Cheney by a margin of 57%-28%.
Even in a political era that has been defined by erroneous polling, overcoming a near-30-point deficit would be, by all accounts, verging on the impossible.
But as is always (or at least always should be) the case in the United States of America, the voters – in this case, Wyoming’s own – will have the final say in Liz Cheney’s fate.
Her congressional career started with one blundering miscalculation and has generated an endless amount since; but if virtually all indications prove correct, it will, indeed, be a stinging, well-deserved verdict.