Former Representative Liz Cheney’s remarks earlier this week in New York City that the country is “electing idiots” probably have led many on the right either to agree with her, or to perhaps say, “Look in the mirror.”
Appearing at a community center, the former Republican member of Congress from Wyoming and the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney remarked, “Look, I think that the country right now faces hugely challenging and fundamentally important issues. What we’ve done in our politics is create a situation where we’re electing idiots.”
Although Cheney spoke in the plural — idiots — the only person she mentioned by name was former President Donald Trump. It was her vehement opposition to Trump that brought her accolades from the national media and Democrats, as well as her crushing defeat for reelection in conservative Wyoming, where she was ousted from the Republican Party by Harriet Hageman, garnering less than 29 percent of the vote.
Ironically, virtually the same people who hated her father were her biggest cheerleaders during her last few months in Congress, where she was vice chairman of the “select” committee ostensibly investigating the events of January 6th, 2021 at the U.S. Capitol. Although the committee, selected by then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, was technically “nonpartisan,” the only Republicans allowed on the committee were Trump haters such as Cheney.
Much like her father, Liz Cheney was considered a “conservative” Republican, but her score was a mere 57 percent on the Freedom Index, which measures the fidelity of a member of Congress to the U.S. Constitution. While Cheney was known to vote conservatively on some issues, she followed in her father’s footsteps as a strong neoconservative, favoring one foreign involvement after another by the United States. For example, she voted to expand NATO, she opposed bringing troops home from Syria, she favored military aid to Ukraine, and she even opposed the repeal of the two-decades-old Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), in which Congress authorized President George W. Bush to invade Iraq. Cheney’s father actually advised Bush to not even seek any sort of congressional approval for military action in Iraq, arguing it was not constitutionally necessary.
And it wasn’t only foreign affairs in which Cheney often deviated from the conservative position. She also voted for red flag laws, which are not very popular in the Western state of Wyoming.
“Because of the situation that we’re in, where we have a major-party candidate who’s trying to unravel our democracy — and I don’t say that lightly — we have to think about, all right, what kind of alliances are necessary to defeat him, and those are the alliances we’ve got to build across party lines,” Cheney said.
She added, “I really believe — and I’ve never believed something as strongly as I know this — that the single most important thing for the country is that Donald Trump can’t be anywhere near the Oval Office again.”
Despite her assertion that we need to elect “serious” people to public office, she made no comments at all — positive or negative — about President Joe Biden, who is in obvious cognitive decline. Biden actually forgot that a member of Congress, whose funeral he attended a month earlier, had died. He later quipped, “God save the Queen” (who has also passed away), and the like. Why a president of the United States would say such a thing anyway is a puzzle, but such gaffes are rather common with Joe Biden, and have been for several years. In fact, he even commented this week that President Vladimir Putin of Russia is losing the war in Iraq.
Of course, Russia is not at war with Iraq.
But the problem is not that our public officials are idiots (although even before his mental decline, Biden was not a person of great intellect). The problem is that so many of our public officials — such as Biden and Liz Cheney — are just unprincipled individuals who frequently ignore their oath of office to the Constitution. Perhaps if they were actual idiots there could be some sympathy for their problem. But Biden and Cheney, along with Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, other Democrats, and far too many Republicans, know exactly what they are doing when they ignore the clear wording of the United States Constitution.
An idiot might at least make a mistake in favor of limited government and individual liberty every now and then.
