Vice Chair Liz Cheney, Rep. Adam Schiff, and Rep. Adam Kinzinger, stand together during a break as the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol holds its first public hearing to reveal the findings of a year-long investigation, at the Capitol in Washington on June 9.J. Scott Applewhite/The Associated Press
It was Dick Cheney, the Darth Vaderish vice-president who undermined one Republican president. He was the one who sped George W. Bush into the Iraq war. Now another Cheney, his daughter Liz, is out to undermine another.
In contrast to her father, who is widely viewed as a villain, Ms. Cheney, in spearheading congressional hearings into the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, is fast becoming an American heroine.
At a time when the country’s democracy teeters, when a great many in her Republican party appear to be comfortable with a form of fascism, Ms. Cheney is showing the courage to confront them and their leader, Donald Trump, head on.
She is determined to drive a stake through the former president, to slay the dragon. That’s a tall order but the 55-year-old congresswoman could inflict enough damage on Mr. Trump to make a resurgence by him much more difficult.
A hard-liner who hails from from extremely conservative Wyoming, a state where two out of every three adults own guns, Ms. Cheney commands the committee hearings with forbidding calm and pistol-like precision. Without her these proceedings would be seen as just a partisan attack exercise by Democrats, much like the two impeachments of Mr. Trump.
The shot she fired to open the hearings last week is already being etched in stone. “Tonight, I say this to our Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible: There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonour will remain.”
Defending the indefensible? The committee sessions are revealing the supporters of Mr. Trump to be guilty of doing just that. They’re hearing it from those who worked at Mr. Trump’s side and have given testimony on how “detached from reality,” to use his former attorney-general Bill Barr’s words, he was.
The hearings are much more thorough than the impeachment ones. Committee members collected testimony from more than 1,000 witnesses.
Twenty million Americans viewed the opening session. But the question is how many will be swayed by them?
The track record offers little encouragement. Mr. Trump has somehow escaped, whether it be from luck or guile or hogwash, from almost every fix he has ever been in.
The Trump base has held as firm as concrete throughout. His right-wing media echo-system is treating the hearings dismissively. They complain there is no cross-examination of witnesses by the Trump side.
And while the hearings have been compelling thus far, there has been nothing jaw-droppingly new to draw attention the way the Watergate hearings did a half century ago.
But haymakers are being landed. The sight of former Trump loyalists and co-workers, one after another, coming forward to decry his election-was-stolen claim as preposterous has to have some resonance.
The driving imperative for Mr. Trump’s continued politicking is that very fiction. The more it’s debunked, the more he’s debunked.
The committee has heard that the former president used “the big lie,” as it is commonly called now, to fleece supporters of US$250-million in post-election contributions. Most of the money went not to fund court battles as promised but to the Save America PAC, which is the major Trump-supporting political action committee.
Much more is to come. Ms. Cheney says a hearing Thursday will highlight Mr. Trump’s “relentless efforts” to persuade vice-president Mike Pence to refuse to count the electoral votes. Mr. Trump was told it was illegal to do this, she says. As for the Capitol riot, she’s made the case that he had no intention of stopping it, not even on hearing mob members chanting, “Hang Mike Pence!” Mr. Trump’s response to that, the committee heard, was, ”Maybe our supporters have the right idea. Mike Pence deserves it.”
For her efforts in opposing Mr. Trump, Ms. Cheney is likely to be stripped of her Congressional seat come August. Her challenger in a primary holds a commanding lead in polls.
But by then she could well have done the damage. The case the committee is building could well lead to criminal charges against Mr. Trump from the Justice Department. Defectors from Trumpworld are likely to multiply. Several Republicans are already preparing campaigns for the 2024 presidential nomination, feeling the con man is vulnerable.
In good part thanks to Liz Cheney, it’s his own party coming after him this time. In her gallant bid to reattach Republicans to reality, she warrants the acclaim she is receiving.
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