In an interview with Jonathan Karl on ABC’s “This Week,” she put it succinctly:
On the Republican party having lost the popular vote in five of the past six presidential elections, Rep. Liz Cheney tells @jonkarl the GOP should be "very concerned."
— This Week (@ThisWeekABC) May 16, 2021
"We have to stop incentivizing unserious behavior among our elected officials." https://t.co/FUcMvx8Wz2 pic.twitter.com/8wvCXagovl
She is right about “incentivizing unserious behavior,” just as she is right about the hysterical tone of discourse encouraged by right-wing media, both online and in traditional outlets.
The conservative Cheney is not immune to going overboard when she calls President Biden’s popular center-left agenda “socialism” or invokes the amorphous boogeyman of “corporate wokeness,” a trigger for reminding the GOP base that they are “victims” of cultural elites. Granted, this is mild stuff compared with what comes out of the mouths of MAGA Republicans.
But here is where Cheney might have a big impact on our discourse. She could, for example, push for expulsion of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), whose latest instance of stalking Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) should remove any doubt that she is unfit to hold office. As The Post reported, Greene aggressively confronted Ocasio-Cortez on Wednesday as she left the House chamber, shouting as she accused Ocasio-Cortez of supporting “terrorists and antifa.”
It would be refreshing to hear from a rock-ribbed Republican like Cheney that there is no place in Congress for a raving QAnon follower. Cheney also could admonish Republicans to stop equating the overwhelmingly peaceful Black Lives Matter protests with the Jan. 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters.
Cheney has already ventured onto Fox News to say that conservative media, “especially Fox News,” has an obligation not to perpetuate the “big lie” that the presidential election was stolen. (Disclosure: I am an MSNBC contributor.) But Cheney could also specifically deplore the cheering for “replacement theory” — a racist and anti-Semitic trope seemingly designed to instill panic among the GOP’s White base. Ending the toxic and false association of immigrants with crime, climate change denial and the fiction that police abuse is just a few “bad apples” would help guide the political debate to a rational conversation about the type of immigration reform the country needs, the best ideas for converting to renewable energy and the most effective police reform measures.
Cheney has made clear that Trump is a threat to American democracy as he primes the MAGA base to reject elections that do not go their way. Now, she should condemn her House and Senate colleagues who do the same, and demand that all members pledge they will not seek to overturn certified electoral votes in 2024.
Never Trump organizer and activist Sarah Longwell speaks about the “triangle of doom” — the noxious feedback loop of right-wing media, MAGA-subservient politicians and inculcated voters. Cheney’s biggest contribution would be to weaken, if not obliterate, the triangle of doom and make room in Republican politics for truth, rationality and substance. That may cost Cheney her seat and, if she is successful in exposing the Republicans’ threat to democracy, it might cost her party a House majority. But as she has said, true lovers of democracy need to put devotion to democracy above personal ambition and partisan loyalty.
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