For a political party that has a lot of catching up to do when it comes to women, the Republicans most out front challenging the GOP’s Trumpian slide away from democracy are women.
Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) could have turned a blind eye to the events of Jan. 6 like most of her colleagues and kept her seat in Congress. But unlike almost all of them, she had the cojones to tell the truth about former President Donald Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election, the first time a defeated president tried to topple a core pillar of democracy.
When then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called Cheney to recruit her for the bipartisan Jan. 6 committee, the two women knew of each other but had no personal relationship. “Call me Nancy,” Pelosi said, setting a tone of mutual respect that rose above the day-to-day partisan politics.
According to Cheney’s newly released book, Honor and Oath: A Memoir and a Warning, she learned that a Pelosi aide had compiled a list of the ten worst things she had said about the speaker, and how Pelosi handed it back without a glance, saying, “Why are you wasting my time with things that don’t matter?”
These two women—Cheney and Pelosi—are on a mission to deny Donald Trump another term as president. Beyond that overarching goal, they have very little in common.
Pelosi is a liberal with a long record of supporting government spending on social programs. Cheney is an old school Cold War warrior, a hardliner on almost every issue—and way more conservative than Trump.
She is Republican royalty displaced by Trump, and because of her generation, her family, and her beliefs, she has the sense that the country is more important than her policy agenda or her ambition.
As vice chair of the Jan. 6 committee, Cheney spent hours counseling Cassidy Hutchinson, the young White House aide who found herself at the center of the Jan. 6 insurrection as chief of staff Mark Meadows’ assistant. Initially represented by a Trump-linked lawyer, Hutchinson’s testimony was terse and nervous as Cheney drew out her story with careful questioning. After changing to a non-Trump affiliated lawyer, Cassidy became a central player in the telling of the Jan. 6 story of the White House’s involvement.
In her book, Enough, Hutchinson describes her rural background, the pain of her parents’ divorce, her Trumpian gun-loving father, her one-time worshipful attitude toward Trump—even her wish to join Trump’s staff at Mar-a-Lago after he left the White House. It wasn’t a straight line to where she is now, so intense and stern and resolved about Trump and the threat he presents.
Her evolution makes it so clear how few vertebrates there are in today’s Republican Party, with the most striking among them women.
Why are these women such standouts?
For starters, Cheney and Hutchinson have nothing left to lose and a lot to gain if the future unfolds as they warn. Women are tougher in politics—think Golda Meir who led Israel during war, and Margaret Thatcher, whose tough-love conservatism peeled back Britain’s social welfare state.
Former Gov. Nikki Haley (R-SC) is nowhere near these iconic role models, but she is in the arena. Polls show Haley and Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) vying for a distant second to Trump in Iowa and New Hampshire. She’s criticized Trump for adding to the deficit and not being tough enough against China, which is pretty weak tea with the Iowa caucuses a month away.
She says Trump was a good president who met the moment, and it’s time to move on. She’s a shape-shifter, not burdened much by principle, but she’s still standing in the GOP primary process. That’s saying something. Her smart put-downs of “the fellas” standing on the stage—the machismo DeSantis and the loathsomely rude Vivek Ramaswamy—generate likes from women across the partisan and generational divides.
If a new Republican Party emerges from the efforts to keep Trump out of office, the women who are taking risks today by speaking out against the Republican frontrunner will be the architects of tomorrow’s GOP—should one emerge.
Cheney is keeping her powder dry for now, selling her book, and her buddy Nancy better make sure she’s on board for Biden by next summer. Maybe nominating speeches at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago by Cheney and Hutchinson. From today’s vantage point, that seems more plausible than either of them appearing at a Republican National Convention that nominates Trump.
“It has to be prime time (for Cheney),” says Larry Sabato, the founder and director of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. “She still has her conservative views, but she knows there’s only one party standing for democracy.” Sabato hired Cheney last spring as his center’s “Professor of Practice,” and she’s been “a big hit” with students, he says, as someone who gave up her career in elective office to speak truth to power.
Watching Trump’s unhinged speech at his Jan. 6 rally on the Ellipse, where he implored Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to certify the election, former Vice President Dick Cheney called his daughter, warning her, “You are in danger.”
Those who speak out and continue to make their views known live with a constant awareness that the passions Trump arouses in people could lead to violence. Yet they persist, and for that they deserve our thanks for leading the way for the rest of us to uphold the democracy that a once great political party turned away from.
