The Daily - ‘Ignoring the Lie Emboldens the Liar’

Episode Date: May 12, 2021

Today, Liz Cheney, the No. 3 Republican in the House, is expected to be removed from her leadership position.She has found herself on a lonely political island by continuing to speak out against former President Donald Trump.We look at the factors behind her ouster and the new requirements for Republican leadership. Guest: Catie Edmondson, a reporter in The New York Times’s Washington bureau. Sign up here to get The Daily in your inbox each morning. And for an exclusive look at how the biggest stories on our show come together, subscribe to our newsletter. Background reading: In turning on Ms. Cheney,Republicans have bowed to Mr. Trump’s election lies.The Wyoming congresswoman challenged Republicans to turn away from Trump after Jan. 6. Instead, they turned on her.“History is watching.” Here are five key arguments from Ms. Cheney’s Washington Post opinion essay this month.For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

From The New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Inside the U.S. Capitol today, House Republicans are expected to remove Congresswoman Liz Cheney as a high-ranking party leader, despite her resume as a reliable conservative and her status as a member of a Republican dynasty. I spoke with my colleague, congressional reporter Katie Edmondson,

about what's motivating Cheney's ouster and the new requirements for being a Republican leader. It's Wednesday, May 12th. Katie, the last time we devoted an episode of The Daily to Congresswoman Elizabeth Cheney, it was because she had just survived an attempt by her fellow Republicans in the House to oust her from her position as the third highest ranking Republican in that chamber. And here we are, three months later, and there's a second attempt to oust Liz Cheney by the same people. And this one looks like it's going to be successful. So that's what we want to talk

to you about. What exactly has changed? Well, I think to understand the story, you have to rewind and look at that first challenge back in February. And the impetus of that challenge really was that the congresswoman had voted to impeach President Trump. But she had not just voted to impeach him. She had released a statement prior to that vote explaining in really scathing, unsparing terms exactly why she thought his actions to foment the would come to the House floor, point over to the Republican side of the aisle and say, Republicans' number three leader, Congresswoman Liz Cheney, agrees with us. And that in particular really rubbed many Republicans the wrong way. Many of them would have been already upset with her just because she voted to impeach the president. But it wasn't just the vote. It was the way she did it.

And there was actually a big moment in that closed door meeting where Republicans were discussing should we keep Liz Cheney in leadership or not, where the top Republican leader, Kevin McCarthy, actually stood up and gave a rousing speech saying we need to keep Liz. And part of his argument was you elected me as your leader. And I chose Liz to be in my leadership team and I am vouching for her. And she survived the challenge, as we know. And it was a lopsided vote. A large majority of Republicans decided to keep her in leadership. Right.

They decided basically to say, we didn't like what you did. We didn't like the way you did it, but we can live with you as the number three leader of our party in the House. Right. And after they did, Kevin McCarthy came out of the meeting and he told reporters, look, this vote proves that we are a big tent party. We are big enough to accommodate both the former president and someone who voted to impeach him and is a vocal critic of him. And that was a really big moment right after that vote. after that vote. But I think implicit in that statement that he made, and I think this certainly was understood by a number of the rank and file Republicans who did vote to keep her in leadership at that time, was the understanding that this was a warning to her, that with the vote to keep her,

there was an understanding that she needed to toe the party line. And that was particularly because not only is she a member of leadership representing the House conference, but she is the top messenger for the House Republican conference. And so they were really expecting, I think, an about face from her after that vote. And so what happens with that implicit understanding? her after that vote. And so what happens with that implicit understanding? Well, it becomes very clear that she is not going to abide by this understanding, as some Republicans had thought, and that she is going to continue speaking out in the starkest of terms.

And joining us now, Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney, still the number three Republican in the House. Congresswoman- Just a few days after that vote, she goes on Fox News. People have been lied to. 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. And people need to understand that. We need to make sure that we, as Republicans, are the party of truth and that we're being honest about what really did happen

in 2020. And one of the reasons this is so striking, particularly as a reporter who has covered congressional Republicans for the past couple of years, we have spent so much time asking congressional Republicans what they thought about certain claims that the former president made. And we would hear all sorts of sidesteps and redirects and refusals to comment. Right. comment. Right. And so what's so striking here is that the congresswoman is absolutely not doing this, but seems to, in fact, have made a concerted decision that she is going to take these questions head on and use the most unsparing of language to respond. Okay, so what happens next? There was a news conference here in Washington at the Capitol where the top three leaders appeared together.

And at the end of it, a reporter asked each of the leaders. Do you and the leadership, especially Congresswoman Cheney, do you believe President Trump should be speaking or former President Trump should be speaking at CPAC this weekend? Whether the former president should be invited to speak at CPAC at a conservative conference in Florida. And Leader McCarthy, the top Republican, stepped up to the microphone and said, Yes, he should. Yes, I believe that would be appropriate. Reporters then asked Congresswoman Cheney, what do you think about this?

And she steps to the microphone and she says, well, That's up to CPAC. I've been clear in my views about President Trump and the extent to which following January 6th, I don't believe that he should be playing a role in the future of the party or the country. I don't think as Republicans we should be associated with the former president anymore. And it led to a very awkward moment. Leader McCarthy then cracked kind of a joke and said, well, on that positive note, I guess the press conference is over.

And that's the end of the conference. And they don't talk to each other. They walk their separate ways. Awkward. Yeah, that's right. And we have that awkwardness sustain for a number of weeks. And it all really comes to a head in late April when House Republicans fly down to Orlando for their conference retreat. And this retreat is really meant to be a moment of unity. It is meant to be a time where they coalesce around the message that they believe is going to win them the majority in 2022. It's supposed to be all about attacking the Biden administration. But what happens is at the conference, Congresswoman Cheney is asked a number of questions about the former president. When asked if Donald Trump would make an appearance, the congresswoman said, quote, I haven't invited him.

She told reporters that any lawmaker who led the bid to invalidate President Biden's electoral victory in Congress should be disqualified from running for president in the Republican primary. She came out and she said this, I quote her, I do think that some of our candidates who led the charge, particularly the senators who led the unconstitutional charge, not to certify the election, you know, in my view, that's disqualifying. And then she also broke with Leader McCarthy when she said that a proposed independent commission to investigate the January 6th riot

should focus solely on the attack on the Capitol and the actions of the pro-Trump mob. I think that what happened on January 6th is unprecedented in our history. And I think that it's very important that the commission be able to focus on that. Rather than trying to scrutinize violence by Black Lives Matter protesters or Antifa throughout the year, which is what Leader McCarthy had suggested. I'm very concerned, as all my colleagues are, about the violence that we saw, the BLM, the Antifa violence last summer.

I think that's a different set of issues, a different set of problems, and a different set of solutions. By the time the week comes to a close in Orlando, it becomes abundantly clear, I think, to Republican leaders that these broadsides from her are in fact going to continue. And so what do those leaders do? Well, when they come back from Orlando... House Minority Leader Ken McCarthy joins us now live. Leader McCarthy goes on Fox and Friends. We all need to be working as one if we're able to win

the majority. And he questions whether she can effectively carry out her role as the party's top messenger. I have heard from members concerned about her ability to carry out the job as conference chair, to carry out the message. He doesn't say anything explicitly about whether she should be ousted from the party's ranks, but that he's hearing concerns from his rank and file members. It's more concerned about the job ability to do and what's our best step forward, that we can all work together instead of attacking one another. And then later, a leaked audio tape comes out of him in the green room before going on the program. I think she's got real problems. I've had it with her. I've lost confidence.

And that is a huge deal because he had stood up in that room in February and defended her and implored his members to support her. So help us understand why Leader McCarthy no longer feels he can defend Cheney because, as you said, Katie, he had just a few months ago said that the tent that is the Republican Party is big enough to accommodate someone like her who voted to impeach Donald Trump? Well, he really has one focus right now, and that is keeping his conference united and in a position where they can win back the majority in the upcoming midterms in 2022. And instead of having a united leadership team, he is seeing Congresswoman Cheney's repeated comments as a distraction. The headlines that are coming from her press conferences are not necessarily about how terrible Democrats are. They're about her litigating what has become an internal division in their conference. And to him, that becomes

increasingly untenable. And Katie, Liz Cheney would seem to understand all this, right? I mean, she is a politically savvy person. She's the daughter of Dick Cheney himself, a member of Congress and a former vice president. So what is your understanding of why she keeps speaking out the way that she decides to speak out? I think there are a few things going on. What she has said publicly was that what she and other lawmakers experienced at the Capitol on January 6th was simply so terrible and so antithetical to what American democracy should look like that she feels it is incumbent upon her to keep speaking out. And it's worth pointing out that initially, right after the attack on the Capitol, Leader McCarthy himself said in a speech

that he believed that the former president, that Trump, bore some responsibility for fomenting that riot. He later kind of walked those comments back. And we saw that from Senator Mitch McConnell, the minority leader. He spoke out and denounced President Trump's election lie and said, this is a real problem for the party. And I think that Congresswoman Cheney assumed that there was going to be a critical mass of influential Republicans who were going to continue to speak out on this and that she would have some political backup. Which never happened. Right. She continued to speak up, speak out at any chance she was given. But what we saw from a lot of other Republicans was that they did move on,

and she basically found herself on a pretty lonely political island as a result. So when does it become clear that it's kind of over for Cheney as a leader in the party? that it's kind of over for Cheney as a leader in the party. The kind of remarkable thing about watching all of this take place is that once the snowball started rolling down the hill, it became extremely hard to stop that momentum. We started hearing from some rank-and-file lawmakers who were quite critical of Trump's actions around January 6th, who were saying things like, we just want to take back the majority in 2022. We are so tired of having this infighting aired publicly all of the time.

And we started to hear from Republican leaders that not only did they believe that Liz Cheney could no longer do her job as the party's top messenger, but they had actually coalesced around a replacement who they believed will tow the party line and will not go out of her way to attack President Trump, but will actually be supportive of him and his claims around the election. And that congresswoman is Representative Elise Stefanik from New York. We'll be right back. So, Katie, tell us about this leading candidate to replace Congresswoman Liz Cheney as the number three in the House Republican caucus, Elise Stefanik? Well, Congresswoman Stefanik was elected in 2014. And when she was elected, she actually was the youngest woman ever elected to Congress at that time. She was just 30 years old.

And she really styled herself at that time in a similar establishment vein to Liz Cheney, in a similar establishment vein to Liz Cheney, honestly. She came in as an acolyte of Paul Ryan. She worked in President George W. Bush's administration. And she came in really styling herself as kind of a bipartisan pragmatist willing to work across the aisle with the Democrats. This victory truly belongs to each and every one of you. Right.

In fact, in preparation for this interview, I went and watched some of Congresswoman Stefanik's early speeches, including her acceptance speech when she won that House seat in 2014. Every decision I make, every single vote I take, I will ask myself one simple question. Will this help the hardworking families of the North Country? And I was really struck by just how bipartisan and measured and moderate her message was. And I will work with anyone, regardless of their party affiliation, to get it done. Republicans, Democrats, Independents, and even Green Party members, if you have a good idea,

I'm willing to work with you to get the job done. For example, she really goes out of her way in that speech to talk about the importance of reaching across the aisle. That's right. And, you know, I was actually reading an interview that she gave shortly after she was elected, and she was singing Paul Ryan's praises in that interview. And she singled out something that he had said on the campaign trail, which she thought was really instructive.

And that was Republicans should pray for Democrats and Democrats should pray for Republicans. And she kind of presented that as one of her guiding ethoses in Congress. Mm-hmm. So given these moderate roots of her career in Congress, when do things start to change? Well, looking at it, it's really kind of a slow evolution. When she was on the campaign trail in 2016, President Trump was on the campaign trail. She was very skeptical and sometimes would denounce some of the things he would say. She was very critical about his comments on Gold Star families. She put out a statement after the Access Hollywood tape condemning those comments. But what happened, and she's spoken publicly about this, was while she was on the campaign trail campaigning for her own re-election, she started seeing all of these Trump signs pop up in her district. The energy was just palpable. Anyone on the ground or who was knocking on doors, talking to voters, understood that it was going to be a historic election.

And her district, I should add, is one that voted for Obama twice. Right. And so she started seeing huge rallies in New York, populated with people she had never seen before at Republican political rallies. And come Election Day, she is returned to Washington. Trump obviously wins the White House, and he carries her district by significant digits. But it's really a microcosm of the growing Republican Party and the growing share of the electorate that helped President Trump win in 2016. And we need to maintain.

So when she comes back to D.C., I think her calculation is slightly different. I think we slowly started to see her evolve into someone who was willing to be a little bit more supportive of certain policies of his and of him writ large than she had been on the campaign trail. And I think most people would really say the metamorphosis sort of was completed when it came to his first impeachment trial. As every day goes by, Adam Schiff and the Democrats' wishful thinking for impeachment crumbles. For a lot of people, especially those who had followed her political trajectory, there was no quid pro quo. I think it was really almost as if a switch had flipped. And you know what witness they will not call? It's Hunter Biden. Suddenly she was using

really intense language. This is a partisan process and it's a complete waste of energy. There's so much has been an abject failure. She would become a viral sensation anytime there was a little clip of her just tearing into Democrats. This is the fifth time you have interrupted members of Congress, newly elected members of Congress. And the Republican base just loved it. The donations started pouring into her campaign. And because I've been such an outspoken advocate for the facts, I have been attacked by the Hollywood left who have dumped millions into supporting my far left Democratic opponent, which is why I need the

American people to step up, donate at fight shift dot com to help me speak for the American people in my district. And not only did Republicans on Capitol Hill and the media take notice, but President Trump took notice. He went out of his way to thank her and in particular, lavished praise on her for the way that she was attacking Democrats. And so she really saw, I think, a number of benefits to her performance. So I'm curious, after President Trump survives the impeachment, but then goes on and loses re-election, and then conjures up this lie that fraud was the reason why. How does this new version of Congresswoman Stefanik, this defender of the president, how does she respond to that?

Well, I think there was a big question on the Hill when we saw that this challenge was kind of being ginned up, which of his supporters would be willing to indulge it. And just a couple of days before that vote was planned on January 6th, she came out and said that she would vote to object to some of President Biden's electors, particularly in Pennsylvania. And just a few hours after the riot unfolded at the Capitol, Congresswoman Stefanik went ahead and voted to object to the Pennsylvania electors. And in the following weeks, when the House moved to impeach President Trump for his role in

fomenting the January 6th riot, she voted against impeaching him. So in almost every way, Congresswoman Stefanik does the exact opposite of Congresswoman Cheney. Stefanik parrots statements from President Trump that arguably helped instigate the riot at the Capitol. She votes against certifying Biden as the winner of the election. She votes against impeaching President Trump for his role in the riot, all of which, it sounds like, makes Stefanik perfectly suited in this moment to be a Republican House leader. Well, that's right. I was going to say, while each of those moves put her at odds with Congresswoman Cheney, they put her in the company of the other top two Republican leaders, both of whom voted to overturn the election and against impeaching President Trump. So Katie, if, as we suspect, there is this swap in Republican leadership of Stefanik

for Cheney, it feels like the party is creating a pretty simple litmus test for who can be a leader in the Republican Party at this moment. And the test is, are you willing to support or tolerate, but really support, Donald Trump's lie about the election? I think that's right. And I think the data point that really underscores that this has become sort of the singular issue defining whether someone can be in leadership or not, is if you actually look at each of these Congresswoman's voting records, Congresswoman Cheney has a far more conservative voting record, according to a number of conservative groups who very closely track these things, than Congresswoman Stefanik, who again modeled herself in those

early days in Congress as a moderate willing to reach across the aisle. Right. And I think that data point says a lot to your point about what the true litmus test is. And it's not necessarily about whether you are a paragon of conservative ideology. It's about this one issue, about Trump and the election. But to be clear, Katie, I wonder, based on your reporting, how you think about the way that this new unified House Republican leadership

thinks about the question of the 2020 election. I mean, there's a version of this where they actually believe what they are saying or not saying about the big lie of fraud in the 2020 election. But it's also possible that for them this is about political calculations, about the fact that many of their voters believe it, about creating a political justification for new voting restrictions that might help them win future elections. It might be about how important Donald Trump is to winning the next election for Republicans and how afraid they are about speaking out against him in a way that Liz Cheney has that would prompt him to turn on them and maybe split the party into two. I mean, how do you think about why it's now necessary to support this lie to be a Republican leader? I think it's very much a political calculation.

I have spoken to Republican lawmakers who go home and tell me that they're hearing from their voters, why aren't you doing more? Or why aren't you doing enough to fix the fact that Joe Biden stole the election? And so that's the baseline that they're hearing from their voters. I think there's an idea right now among many House Republicans that the reason why they're being forced to grapple with this episode they really don't want to talk about is because Liz Cheney keeps bringing it up.

But if you look at the terrain, that's just not true, right? If you look at their voters, this is a concept that their voters have completely bought into and will bring up to them repeatedly. If you look at former President Trump, he continues to trumpet out these claims of a stolen election almost daily. And then if you look at what's happening in state legislatures across the nation, they are trying to respond to this idea of a major election integrity problem plaguing the nation's elections. So this is not an issue that somehow has been brought about by Liz Cheney. And I think by purging her from their ranks, they're actually sending a message in which this issue becomes very central to their identity. Because now we are going to have the top

three House Republicans, assuming Congresswoman Stefanik does prevail in replacing her, we're going to have those top three Republicans all be people who voted not to certify Joe Biden's election. Right. And therefore, in composition and in conduct, these three leaders will have sent out the message that to leave the Republican Party right now, you have to accept the big lie about the 2020 election,

or you can object to it very, very quietly. That's right. I think the message is you have to be willing to at least indulge the idea of a stolen election. Mm-hmm. Which Congresswoman Stefanik seems to be willing to do based off of what we've seen so far. Okay, thank you very much. We appreciate it.

Thanks, Michael. Remaining silent and ignoring the lie emboldens the liar. I will not participate in that. On Tuesday night, on the eve of the vote to oust her from Republican leadership, Congresswoman Cheney delivered a defiant speech from the House floor in which she called out her fellow Republican leaders for endorsing what she called a profoundly destructive lie. I will not sit back and watch in silence

while others lead our party down a path that abandons the rule of law and joins the former president's crusade to undermine our democracy. The vote to remove Congresswoman Cheney is expected later this morning. The vote to replace her with Congresswoman Stefanik is expected later this week. We'll be right back. Here's what else you need to know today. Clashes between Israel and Hamas intensified on Tuesday,

with missiles launched from Gaza striking cities across Israel, including Tel Aviv. Gaza, striking cities across Israel, including Tel Aviv. And airstrikes launched from Israel, inflicting significant damage on neighborhoods in Gaza. In Gaza, officials said that the airstrikes had killed 30 Palestinians and wounded more than 200 others. and wounded more than 200 others. In Israel, at least three people were reported killed and at least 100 were wounded. And on Tuesday, a federal judge rejected an attempt by the National Rifle Association

to avoid the oversight of regulators in New York by filing for bankruptcy in Texas. The NRA had sought to use the bankruptcy to circumvent the Attorney General of New York, Letitia James, who is aggressively investigating the group and its leaders for corruption. In his ruling, the judge called it an improper use of bankruptcy law. called it an improper use of bankruptcy law. Today's episode was produced by Rachel Quester,

Aastha Chaturvedi, and Diana Nguyen, with help from Sydney Harper. It was edited by Dave Shaw, engineered by Chris Wood, and contains original music by Dan Powell and Marion Lauzon. That's it for The Daily. I'm Michael Bavaro. See you tomorrow.