Can anyone imagine Nancy Pelosi allowing one of her top lieutenants in Democratic leadership to oppose the impeachment of former President Trump? Of course not. You can’t imagine it, because their is no way in hell Pelosi would allow someone so wildly out of step with the rest of the caucus and with her liberal base to be in leadership.
Liz Cheney isn’t just some back bencher Republican, she chose to be in leadership and the Republican caucus elected her. She isn’t from a swing district where she needs to flex her bipartisan bonafides to get reelected – she represents a district (the state of Wyoming) that Trump carried with 70%. And yet, Liz Cheney was allowed to not only vote to impeach the former President, but to become one of the lead cheerleaders of the effort.
She survived a secret ballot vote to retain her leadership position by a more than 2 to 1 margin (with 145 Republicans voting for Cheney and just 61 voting to remove her).
If you want to know how any of this is possible the answer is pretty simple: the Republican establishment hates its base. It always has and apparently it always will.
The left and the Never Trumpers claim Cheney should be applauded for “voting her conscience,” which of course is a nice way of saying Cheney gave the finger to the voters of Wyoming who she is supposed to represent.
The Republican establishment thinks that its base is stupid and that they know what we need (even if we are too dumb to realize it for ourselves). This approach to governing is nothing new, for decades the Republican establishment told its base to accept the policies of Bush, McCain and Romney.
Then along came Trump. Trump told the Republican base that they didn’t have to pretend to enjoy the crap sandwich that the establishment had been serving them for decades. Trump succeeded in winning over the GOP because he offered the base what it actually wanted. None of us cared one iota about the Paul Ryan budget blueprint and Trump told us we could stop pretending.
There is no going back now. You can’t put the base back into their cages. We simply won’t be told how we are supposed to feel and who we are supposed to vote for.
As I said in my most recent column for The Political Insider:
The establishment will tell you that we need to bury the hatchet and focus on winning back Republican majorities in the House and Senate in 2022.
Ignore them.
They want you to bury the hatchet they just shoved in your back, they want you to be the good little foot soldiers that voted for Bush and McCain and Romney, and most of all they want you to let them get back to doing things the way they used to do things before Trump showed up.
The establishment is right, winning back the majority in the House and Senate in 2022 is important, but not until we as conservatives win back our own party.
It is time to clean house. We don’t have to guess which Republicans we can trust, they have exposed themselves over the two months.
Liz Cheney and the duplicitous Republican establishment is going to learn the hard way that things aren’t going back to the way they used to be. This isn’t about Trump, this is about us – the base of the Republican Party. It’s our party now.
“It is time to clean house.” And fill it with more MTG’s?