Liz Cheney and the ‘Big Lie’
When the No. 3 House Republican gets the high jump this week, the real loser will be the attempt to suppress any real examination of what happened in the last election.
By Conrad Black
May 10, 2021
The vote this week on Representative Liz Cheney’s (R-Wyo.) status as House Republican conference chairman vastly transcends her. All sides are correct that it is a battle over the “Big Lie.”
Cheney, the Democrats, and NeverTrumpers all say the Big Lie is the contention that 2020 was not a fair election. They argue further that Donald Trump tried to promote the violent overthrow of the government on January 6 at the Capitol. They support Joe Biden’s claim in his address to Congress last month, that his (unnamed) predecessor had left the country “staring into the abyss of insurrection and autocracy.”
Trump supporters and many independents say this series of false and defamatory allegations is the actual Big Lie. It is already clear that Cheney, deservedly, will be thrown out of her leadership and presumably defeated in her bid to remain the representative from Wyoming. She voted with the former president on most occasions; their differences are not primarily over public policy. For her own reasons, she has not only come out of the Trump-hate closet, but declined even to bother testing the air as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) and some others did, by squealing with joy that Trump was gone and then noting that perhaps he had not gone and abruptly returning to the closet of ambiguity.
No one outside of Wyoming, except Peggy Noonan, cares a whit about Liz Cheney. The question is whether the NeverTrumpers, abetted by the Democrats, can kill Trump’s chances of a political resurrection. Success will be impossible unless they can both stamp out the belief of approximately half the voters that 2020 was a tainted election, and keep alive the fiction that Trump was actively promoting an insurrection on January 6.
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