A principled stand

Liz Cheney has become a heroic figure for all of us who cannot stomach Donald Trump and rightly fear his re-election in 2024. A second Trump term in office would not only be a disaster for the deeply divided US but a debacle for a planet facing drought, dust storms, floods, fires and sustained heat waves due to global warming.

Republican Congresswoman Cheney is a heroine because she broke in 2021 with her Trump-dominated party and voted to impeach Trump after the Jan.6 assault on the Capitol, the home of the legislative branch of the US government. The aim of the attack on both the building and the meeting of lawmakers was to prevent the formal confirmation of Democrat Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election. Cheney then joined and became the deputy head of the House of Representatives select committee investigating Trump’s role in this attack.

He has always denied that he lost and argued that the election was “stolen” although Biden won by far more votes than Trump received: seven million more popular votes (81 million to 74 million) and 74 (306 to 232) more votes in the Electoral College, which decides the outcome.

Cheney has taken a principled stand and aggressively interrogated Republicans who served in the Trump administration when they testified during committee hearings seeking to provide evidence of the ex-president’s misconduct and the threat he poses to the US democratic system of governance. Cheney has played a starring role during these hearings, enraging fellow Republicans. The only other member of her party to join the committee is Adam Kitzinger, a legislator from Illinois who does not seek re-election in November’s mid-term poll.

Mainstream Republicans are alarmed by Trump’s grip on their party. Ex-President George W. Bush telephoned Liz Cheney’s father his former Vice President Dick Cheney to ask him to congratulate his daughter on her stand. Few leading Republicans have dared do this as Trump has lashed out at

Cheney and other Republicans who have criticised him and backed their opponents in party primaries to select candidates for the November mid-term election.

Last week, Liz Cheney was defeated by a Trump-sponsored candidate in a party primary in her constituency in her home state of Wyoming. She had no illusions about winning as Wyoming, once a liberal bastion, has been captured by Trumpists.

During her concession speech she said, “The great and original champion of our party, Abraham Lincoln, was defeated in elections for the Senate and the House before he won the most important election of all. Lincoln ultimately prevailed. He saved our union and he defined our obligation as Americans for all of history.”

She vowed to be a leader or among leaders to prosecute the bipartisan battle to restore the pre-Trump party. She also filed documentation for the establishment of a political action committee dubbed “The Great Task” and said she was considering running for president (presumably against Trump) in 2024 although she knows she cannot get past the presidential primary.

The Jan.6 riot compelled Cheney to make a dramatic shift. While Trump was in office she became a “Trumpist” by voting for 93 per cent of the time for his often controversial and damaging poicies. Consequently, she shocked fellow Republicans when she took a principled position. She told fellow Republicans, “There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonour will remain.”

Born in 1966, Cheney grew up between Wyoming and Washington as her father was a congressman representing the family’s home district. She earned her BA degree at Colorado College. While studying law at the University of Chicago, Cheney took courses in Middle East history at the Oriental Insitute, acquiring an interest (oft times damaging) in this part of the world.

During her career in government and three terms in Congress (2017-2022), Liz Cheney followed in her father’s footsteps. She is an ultra-conservative on domestic affairs and an activist neoconservative hawk on foreign policy.

In the first Bush-Cheney administration (2000-2004) she served in senior State Department posts dealing with this region. She is a strong supporter of Israel and has called for regime change in Iran. In 2002-2003, dispite the lies told by Bush/Cheney about Baghdad’s possession of weapons of mass destruction and connections with al-Qaeda, she was a cheerleader for the disastrous US war on Iraq, for which her father was a chief architect. She supported torture of captives who could provide information useful to interrogators.

In 2016 she was elected to the House of Representatives, where she served three terms while espousing most policies adopted by her party. For example, she opposed the 2015 agreement lifting sanctions on Iran in exchange for curbing its nuclear programme and US withdrawal from Afghanistan. It is interesting to point out that Republicans took this line on Afghanistan despite Trump’s end of term rushed agreement with the Taliban to pull out US forces during 2021.

Cheney is certain to have support from traditional and moderate Republicans and many Democrats in her campaign to deny Trump a second term. She will also be cheered by climate-change-fearing governments and citizens of countries around the world.

If he returns to the White House, Trump could again withdraw the US from the Paris Climate Change Accord which binds 197 countries to make sustained efforts to eliminate the causes of global warming. The US, the second largest pollutor, could revese Biden’s efforts to reduce emissions by 40 per cent by 2040.  If the US were to do this, other countries will take the view that there is no point in cutting emissions if the biggest polluters take this line. This would mean that nothing would be done to counter the disastrous and deadly climate and weather events we are suffering for another four years.

Trump also endangered world peace by pulling out of other key international bodies and accords. Despite the covid pandemic he ordered the US withdrawal from the World Health Organisation. His exit from Open Skies Treaty is a setback to international arms control efforts as the measure allows member countries to monitor by air each other’s military installations and activities. Trump announced tarrifs on steel and aluminium from China, launching a trade war with Beijing and souring relations between the main Western and Eastern powers. The Biden administration has followed up by out-trumping Trump, further alienating China by treating it as an enemy rather than striving to reconcile.

Having committed electoral suicide by challenging Trump, it is imperative that Liz Cheney is successful in her campaign to ensure that Trump will not be given a second chance to menace the planet.

Photo: TNS