She told Kevin McCarthy that an apology was definitely not happening. What the hell was Kevin thinking?
Kevin McCarthy tried to get Liz Cheney to apologize for how she handled her vote to impeach former President Trump before last week's highly anticipated House GOP conference meeting — a request she refused, two people with direct knowledge told Axios.
Why it matters: Cheney rolled the dice, refusing her leader's ask and counting on her supporters to keep her as conference chair, the party's No. 3 post in the House. Newly empowered, she's now embracing her role as the Republicans' Trump critic-in-chief.
What we're hearing: McCarthy, who hesitated in the first place about holding a vote to oust Cheney, told her privately hours before Wednesday's caucus meeting that their members wanted to hear her say she was sorry.
- He also suggested it could sway some of her opponents.
- Cheney's team, though, did a whip count, and she was confident she'd secure at least 142 votes, the sources said.
- A McCarthy representative declined to comment.
Inside the room: "Several members have asked me to apologize for the vote, they’ve asked my colleagues who also voted to impeach to apologize for the vote," Cheney (R-Wyo.) told her colleagues.
- "I cannot do that. It was a vote of conscience. It was a vote of principle — a principle on which I stand and still believe."
- Toward the end of last week's four-plus hour meeting, Cheney and members of the House Freedom Caucus demanded — for opposite reasons — that the conference take a vote. She ended up winning 145-61.
“The extent to which the president, President Trump, for months leading up to January 6th, spread the notion that the election had been stolen or that the election was rigged was a lie.”
Cheney tore into Trump, saying presidents who act like him are the “single greatest threat to our republic.”
“We will not forget what happened on January 6th. And that the single greatest threat to our republic is a president who would put his own self-interest above the Constitution, above the national interest.”
The congresswoman said it was Trump who tried to steal the election and that his lies led to the deadly day at the Capitol last month.
“We’ve had a situation where President Trump claimed for months that the election was stolen and then apparently set about to do everything he could to steal it himself,” Cheney said. “And that ended up in an attack on the Capitol. Five people killed that day. That’s the kind of attack that can never happen again.”
The Wyoming representative also floated the idea that one of Trump’s tweets sent “while the attack was underway” calling then vice president Mike Pence a coward may have been “a premeditated effort to provoke violence.”
“The Senate [impeachment] trial is a snapshot. There is a massive criminal investigation underway. There will be a massive criminal investigation of everything that happened on January 6th and in the days before,” Cheney continued, “People will want to know exactly what the president was doing. They will want to know, for example, whether the tweet that he sent out calling Vice President Pence a coward while the attack was underway—whether that tweet, for example, was a premeditated effort to provoke violence… There will be many, many criminal investigations looking at every aspect of this that everyone who was involved, as there should be.”
Cheney’s called Trump’s actions “an assault” and wrapped things up by saying if the Republicans want to win again they “should not be embracing the former president.”
“We have never seen that kind of an assault by a president of the United States on another branch of government, and that can never happen again,” Cheney said.
Over half of Americans believe that former President Donald Trump should be convicted in his upcoming Senate impeachment trial and never hold federal office again, according to a Sunday ABC News/Ipsos poll.
Of the 508 Americans surveyed from February 5 to February 6, about 56 percent agreed Trump should be convicted, while 43 percent responded he should not be. The poll's results have a margin of error of 4.8 points.
Public support for Trump's conviction by the Senate is higher now than during his first impeachment in early 2020. According to an ABC News/Washington Post poll published in January of that year, 47 percent of those surveyed said the Senate should vote to remove Trump from office, and 49 percent said he should not be removed.
Speaking of Kool-Aid guzzlers, don't look for tweets any time soon from two of the most obnoxious of them all:
Twitter suspended Gateway Pundit founder Jim Hoft and radio host Wayne Allyn Root this weekend, with the social media company telling Fox News Hoft's account had repeatedly violated its "civic integrity policy."
Twitter permanently suspended Hoft, while Root told Fox News his suspension appears to be permanent, too.
So some vindication is happening for actual conservatives.
The persistence and courage of the likes of Cheney, Ben Sasse, Adam Kinzinger and Peter Meijer is beginning to pay off.
I'd like to think that LITD and Precipice have played their small part as well.
If the Republican Party can be salvaged, that will be nice, but my main concern over the last five years has been that actual conservatism could remain extricated from Trumpism and find some way to flourish again.
The situation may be more encouraging than I'd been thinking it was for some time.
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