Liz Cheney’s last stand: Why she is staking her career on Jan. 6
On the evening of Jan. 6, 2021, Rep. Liz Cheney had a rendezvous with Clio, the muse of history.
Congress was just about to reconvene to confirm Joe Biden’s victory after being disrupted by a riot that ricocheted round the world. The Wyoming congresswoman strode into Statuary Hall, where officers in tactical gear were leaning against the marble figures of great American men and women, exhausted after hours battling their countrymen.
Above the door, Clio watched over them. She sits atop a clock fashioned by an octogenarian clockmaker from Roxbury, Massachusetts, where 15 of the first Cheneys who came to America are buried. William Cheney arrived in 1640 as part of the wave of Puritans fleeing religious persecution. Two centuries later, Samuel Fletcher Cheney fought to save the Union. And now here stood Elizabeth Lynne Cheney, leader of the House Republican Caucus, on the threshold of an era of division unseen since the Civil War.
It was a solemn moment for the scion of one of America’s most influential Republican families. Perhaps it was no mistake that she had dressed all in black that day. Only a few generations in American history, President John Kennedy once said, have been “granted the role of defending freedom in its hour of maximum danger.”
“Today, that role is ours, as we face a threat we have never faced before: a former president attempting to unravel our constitutional republic,” Representative Cheney would later say. “The question for every one of us is, in this time of testing will we do our duty?”
The No. 3 Republican then went back into the House chamber and was among a minority of her party who did not object to the Electoral College count in two swing states. A week later, she was one of only 10 in her party to vote to he “summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame.” Within months, she lost her leadership position.
