Last week in Congress, 10 House Republicans voted with Democrats to impeach President Donald Trump. The most prominent of these was Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney, the House Republican Conference chair, the third highest-ranking Republican in the House.
The move has angered conservatives who are demanding that Cheney be removed from House leadership. The Alabama Republican Executive Committee is considering a resolution demanding that Cheney be ousted.
Alabama Republican Executive Committee member and Trump loyalist Perry Hooper Jr. said Cheney “no longer deserves” the position. Hooper said that he and Ann Bennett are sponsoring the resolution “to demand her immediate removal from the Chairmanship of the GOP Conference.”
The full 450 members of the Alabama Republican Executive Committee will consider the resolution at their annual Winter Meeting in February. An Alabama Republican Executive Committee resolution would not be binding on members of Alabama’s congressional delegation and certainly would not be binding on Cheney.
In Congress Rep. Andy Biggs, R-Arizona, who chairs the conservative House Freedom Caucus, and Rep. Matt Rosendale, R-Montana, are circulating a petition to force Cheney out of her leadership role for her decision.
“If you’re in leadership, you can vote your conscience, but you can’t get up there and make it harder for the members of your team by giving talking points to the opponents,” one member told The Hill.
Cheney is refusing to step down.
“I’m not going anywhere,” she told reporters last week. “This is a vote of conscience. It’s one where there are different views in our conference. But our nation is facing an unprecedented, since the Civil War, a constitutional crisis.”
Cheney also voted against challenges to the Electoral College results in Arizona and Pennsylvania. The majority of House Republicans voted to reject those results.
A spokesman for House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-California, confirmed on Thursday that he will not support House conservatives’ effort to oust Cheney from her position.
All six of the House Republicans representing the state of Alabama voted against impeaching Trump. They all also supported the objections to the Electoral College results in Arizona and Pennsylvania.
President-elect Joe Biden will be inaugurated on Wednesday. It does not appear as though the Senate will have time to hold an impeachment trial before Biden’s inauguration. If Trump is convicted, incoming Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-New York, said that he will then ask the Senate to bar Trump from running for federal office again.
This would, at least in theory, prevent Trump from running for president again in 2024. Some constitutional scholars, including Alan Dershowitz, have questioned the constitutionality of the Senate holding an impeachment trial for a former president.
Schumer should be the Senate majority leader once Vice President-elect Kamala Harris is sworn in as vice president and California Gov. Gavin Newsome appoints Harris’s replacement in the Senate.
