Liz Cheney down – but looking ahead

Rep. Liz Cheney (RINO-Wyo.-At-large) will not return to the House of Representatives next term. Her prime challenger, Harriet Hageman, beat her soundly. And now she is actually looking ahead, confirming CNAV’s impression that she is actually running for President. And she has been doing it throughout this campaign season. She even, in her concession speech, compared herself to one other Republican who lost a congressional (and a Senate) race, then won the Presidency two years later. That man was, of course, Abraham Lincoln.

Liz Cheney race called after twenty-seven minutes

Decision Desk Headquarters, the permanent national election-results pool, called the race at 7:27 p.m. MDT, a scant twenty-seven minutes after polls closed.

At 4:46 a.m. MDT, 99 percent of precincts had reported their results. Here they are:

* = Incumbent Votes in: Estimated 99% Votes counted: 170,409

Interestingly, when Decision Desk called the race, Harriet Hageman had slightly less than 60 percent of the vote. Obviously her lead had widened.

The Democratic results raise a serious question of whether any Democrats “crossed over” to vote for Liz Cheney. Or if they did, the incumbent cannot have gotten very many votes.

Votes in: Estimated > 99% Votes counted: 7,202

The Wyoming Secretary of State, in the last week before the primary, estimated that 10,000 Democrats switched parties. But why? Could it be that they genuinely wanted to start voting Republican right away?

In any case, nearly ninety-six percent of primary voters voted in the Republican primary. Trump carried Wyoming with seventy percent of the vote in 2020. Indeed fewer Democrats voted in their primary than switched parties before it! So thousands of Democrats either stayed home in despair, or have switched permanently.

Alaska also has primaries, with about sixty-three percent of all votes in at 3:00 a.m. Alaska Time.

Such effrontery!

Liz Cheney conceded the race barely an hour after polls closed.

In it she had the effrontery to compare herself with Abraham Lincoln.

The great original champion of our party, Abraham Lincoln, was defeated in elections for the Senate and the house before he won the most important election of all. Lincoln ultimately prevailed. He saved our union and he defined our obligation as Americans for all of history.

This is the most important thing to take away from her speech. Her reasons for supporting bills of attainder and an ex post facto law are incidental. She actually plans to repeat the triumph of Abraham Lincoln, who did lose house and Senate races before becoming President.

Of course she insists that Donald Trump is the greatest threat to “democracy.” She rejects absolutely everything Trump says as a lie. In her world, Democrats won the Election of 2020 fair and square. Also in the Liz Cheney world, the FBI were merely doing their jobs in the Trump Raid. In line with this, she pledged – or threatened – to “do whatever it takes” to make sure Trump never again serves as President.

Definitions

A bill of attainder is a law declaring a particular person to be an outlaw. Literally it’s what happens when the legislature singles out a person or persons for punishment. Trial in a bill of attainder case, if one can call it that, takes place in the legislature itself. A committee holds preliminary hearings and returns the equivalent of a true bill of indictment. Then a full chamber would take up the bill, as with other bills.

An ex post facto law prescribes punishment for conduct prior to its passage. By definition it is retroactive. Under any regime that allows that, one cannot be sure that the legislature will not hold him guilty for conduct that the legislature might even have favored at the time.

In this case, the January 6 Committee is taking the place of a court of preliminary hearing. And as you will see, Liz Cheney still believes that Committee can function. But the only way it will function enough to do the work she wants it to do, is if Democrats retain the House and Senate at Midterms. And that has less than a snowball’s chance in an active volcano of happening. She’s still sane enough to know it, so her rhetoric rings hollow.

What will Liz Cheney do next?

In her concession speech, Liz Cheney makes clear what her next steps will be. She will throw herself into the work of the “January 6 Committee.” How many more hearings that committee will hold, no one can guess.

Our nation is barreling once again toward crisis, lawlessness and violence.

Unquote Liz Cheney. But she isn’t talking about the real and constant violence in America’s inner cities. Nor does she comment on prosecuting attorneys who won’t prosecute, presumably because:

A thief is an irregular wealth-redistribution agent.

And maybe also because a murderer is an irregular summary executioner, and his victim deserved to die for social justice.

But none of that concerns or even fazes Liz Cheney. Oh, no! She paints the lurid picture of Trump leading a putsch to overthrow Biden’s government. Or maybe she wants people to fear a Night of Long Knives, should Trump win re-election.

One can scarcely imagine whose votes she is trying to get—unless she intends to seek the Democratic Presidential nomination. After all, she has just called Trump the equivalent of Juan Perón. When she does that, she calls more than half of America’s voters the equivalent of Peronistas. To reinforce the point: if, as she charges, Trump is trying to “provoke violence and threats of violence,” then she accuses more than half the country of being ready to do violence. That can only mean she would like to arrest and imprison that half – under a massive bill of attainder.

What next for the rest of us?

Robert Costa of CBS News carried this interview, providing further evidence that Liz Cheney is running for President. He quotes her as saying,

Win or lose, this is the beginning of the battle for democracy.

Her rhetoric, and her declaration of targets, make clear that she is the real threat to our republic. (“Democracy” is two wolves and a lamb voting on what’s for dinner.) Therefore we must do whatever it takes to ensure Liz Cheney never gets anywhere near the Oval Office. That shouldn’t be too difficult. Her pathways to the Oval Office are narrow and have many chasms she would have to jump. But that’s not enough to close them. So while so many of our colleagues are predicting that she’ll have to move back in with her father, or something equally silly, CNAV will watch her like hawks and sound the alarm when necessary. That Abraham Lincoln reference might be brass-hat idiotic. But it should also serve as a warning.