Liz Cheney lost her primary Tuesday night and many Democrats lost their minds lamenting that loss. On social media I witnessed otherwise rational Democrats with large platforms argue Cheney should be given an ambassadorship or the Congressional Medal of Freedom or a place in the Biden administration.
Snap out of it, folks.
Liz Cheney is not your friend, she was never your friend. Stop repeating that tired, nonsensical aphorism that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” No. The enemy of your enemy is just another enemy. The Republican party and all its electeds are your enemy. They tell you every day at every level of government. They even vote against their own most vulnerable constituents, so stop thinking they care about you. Liz Cheney opposing Trump now doesn’t make her an ally. That’s faulty — and dangerous — thinking.
Liz Cheney has done creditable work on the January 6th Committee. Cheney deserves plaudits for that work. But beyond that Committee, Cheney is best known for helping America get to where we are now: fighting a growing fascist threat from the very party that ousted her in a landslide for not being faithful enough to its extremist leader, Donald Trump. Donald Trump, who is currently being investigated for violating the Espionage Act and for obstructing justice — again.
Yet make no mistake, Liz Cheney isn’t a Never Trumper. She’s not one of those Republicans who felt queasy about Trump in 2016 or 2020 and voted Libertarian or wrote in Ronald Reagan, like Maryland’s GOP governor Larry Hogan, or one of those Republicans who worked for the Lincoln Project. Rather, Liz Cheney voted for Trump twice, in 2016 and 2020. And while Trump was in office, Cheney voted for his policies 93% of the time. That meant voting against civil rights and civil liberties for people who aren’t wealthy, white, male and heterosexual. It also meant voting against basics like lowering the cost of insulin for the 1 in 10 Americans who are diabetic, or voting against getting baby formula from other countries when there was a shortage here a few months ago.
Who votes against babies and sick people?
Liz Cheney also voted against the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, so all these claims that she stands for democracy are vitiated by that vote. She also voted against the Equality Act twice, even though her only sibling, Mary Cheney, is a lesbian. Just last week Cheney voted against Biden’s historic climate legislation and lowering drug prices for seniors in the Inflation Reduction Act.
Cheney is no RINO. She’s not a centrist Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema or even a Susan Collins or Lisa Murkowski. Cheney voted the same as Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, Matt Gaetz and other GOP Trumpists. Rather, Cheney’s a stalwart neo-con who worked in the State Department throughout her father Dick Cheney’s administration and has staunchly defended the controversial Bush-Cheney stance on torture and all the anti-LGBTQ policies of that administration. Until 2021 she was also against same-sex marriage and she remains vehemently anti-abortion.
In her concession speech, Cheney vowed to be “the leader, one of the leaders, in a fight to help to restore our party,” by which she means to its previous conservative misogynist, racist, anti-LGBTQ roots. Her main objection to Trump was his refusal to concede when he lost and the messy and ultimately dangerous chain of illegal events his refusal engendered — like the January 6th siege on the Capitol.
Cheney has also said she will consider a run for president, though if one can only garner a third of the votes in the least populous state where one’s family is political royalty, it’s difficult to see what the path might be for her in a crowded 2024 Republican field that will likely include Trump, GOP governors Ron DeSantis, Larry Hogan, Kristi Noem, Greg Abbott and senators Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Tom Cotton and former U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley.
What’s concerning about all the Democratic hand-wringing over Cheney’s loss is that it signals a consistent problem within the Democratic party: the quest for bipartisanship with people who do not share our values. Concomitant with that is the mythologizing of people whose anti-Trump stance is confused with a rejection of core Republican beliefs. Fold in a squishy electorate more easily dissatisfied with Democrats than Republicans and you get Virginia last November where 67,000 Democrats voted for Glenn Youngkin based on his “parental rights” platform which was fundamentally racist and anti-LGBTQ, as I reported at the time.
The lure of the anti-Trump, anti-Democratic Republican continues to wield power in an increasingly divided and easily angered America. Three years of the pandemic and all that has wrought has feralized a lot of people — we’re mad as hell and we don’t know who to take that out on anymore.
But those core GOP beliefs that the Liz Cheney lauders choose to ignore are fundamentally anti-woman, anti-LGBTQ and racist. Those stances pose a looming threat to the civil rights and civil liberties of well over half the nation. As I reported last month, the Texas GOP platform has pages of anti-LGBTQ policy, including declaring homosexuality “abnormal” and calling for an end to same-sex marriage. There are currently 300 anti-LGBTQ bills in GOP-led state legislatures, including Pennsylvania’s. And there are many — Supreme Court justices and state attorneys general among them — who want to overturn same-sex marriage laws and even re-institute sodomy laws, as I wrote last month.
While Liz Cheney was waiting for the Wyoming polls to close, Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor, Tom Wolf, was signing Executive Order 2022-2 to protect LGBTQIA+ Pennsylvanians from conversion therapy.
Wolf said, “Conversion therapy is a traumatic practice based on junk science that actively harms the people it supposedly seeks to treat.”
Wolf continued, “This discriminatory practice is widely rejected by medical and scientific professionals and has been proven to lead to worse mental health outcomes for LGBTQIA+ youth subjected to it. This is about keeping our children safe from bullying and extreme practices that harm them.”
At 16, I was committed to the adolescent unit of a local psychiatric hospital for conversion therapy after being expelled for being a lesbian from the Philadelphia High School for Girls that my mother, grandmother and sister all graduated from.
Throughout the 1980s I was one of the best-known opponents of conversion therapy, appearing on local and national radio and TV decrying the practice against members of Exodus International and other pro-conversion therapy groups.
I have fought for decades to end this brutal practice. Wolf’s executive order is one more step toward protecting queer and trans people from what the UN Human Rights Council calls a “dehumanizing” practice.
What Wolf did was what Democrats are known for — evolved on a pivotal civil and human rights issue. The GOP, conversely, keeps talking about “taking America back,” by which they mean wresting hard-won civil rights and civil liberties from those of us in historically marginalized communities. Wolf was acknowledging the damage done to LGBTQ+ people by this pseudo-scientific practice that has harmed more than a million Americans, myself included.
The fact is, even the most centrist Democrat, like Manchin and Sinema, still rallies for women and LGBTQ when votes are needed. For good or ill, Democrats do not fall in lockstep with leadership, but then, Democrats are a wildly diverse group. Republicans are not. One party consistently fights for us and the other fights against us. While 2024 hopefuls like DeSantis accused gay people of grooming children, Liz Cheney was silent — even though she is aunt to the child of a lesbian couple.
Stop being sad for Liz Cheney. Stop thinking Democrats owe her anything. Stop being lured by the false promises of bipartisanship. Midterms will be definitive. Democrats are working for change, the GOP is working to stop it. The choice could not be more clear.