The Alabama Republican Party Executive Committee will meet in February to consider a resolution calling for the removal of Congresswoman Liz Cheney, R-Wyoming, from her position as the Republican Conference Chair, the No. 3 Republican in the House of Representatives.
Trump loyalists argue that Cheney deserves removal from the House GOP leadership because of her controversial vote to impeach then-President Donald Trump. Conservative columnist and author Quinn Hillyer opposes the ALGOP resolution against Cheney. Hillyer called Cheney “brilliant, tough, conservative, principled, and courageous.”
“The resolution against Liz Cheney is asininity personified,” Hillyer said. “First, it seeks to punish a Member of Congress from another state for what was an act of conscience on her part. Both parts of that previous sentence explain why Alabama’s State Executive Committee should butt out.”
Trump was impeached by Congress, because the majority of the members of the House hold him responsible for suggesting that the 2020 election was stolen. and then asking hundreds of thousands of his supporters to come to Washington D.C. to protest the certification of the election results. House prosecutors claim that Trump then inflamed that crowd into an angry mob that stormed the Capitol Building on Jan. 6. Trump’s defenders hold him blameless for the mob’s actions that day.
Cheney was one of 10 House Republicans to vote in favor of impeachment. Hillyer said that Cheney’s decision to vote to impeach Trump was an “act of conscience.”
“If the members of the Executive Committee can’t even recognize that what Trump did was objectionable enough that people of good will can have different ideas as to how to handle it, then they show themselves to be extremist ideologues unfit for America’s system of deliberative democracy,” Hillyer said. “It’s one thing to disagree with her conclusion, but to make it a litmus test of service as Conference Chair is to turn defense of Trump into cultishness. (And, speaking of cultishness, Alabama Republicans should never join in a resolution whose original authors include Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, who is a devotee of the insane conspiracy theories of QAnon. She is to the Republican Party what Ilhan Omar is to the Democrats: a radical embarrassment.)”
Hillyer said that the effort to remove Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, looks petty and vindictive.
“I’ve known Liz Cheney for well over a decade,” Hillyer said. “She is brilliant, tough, conservative, principled, and courageous. Republicans need more like her, even if she’s not always on the same page on every matter of conscience. The effort to remove her as Conference chair makes Republicans look petty, vindictive, and Jacobin, like radical revolutionaries guillotining their own would-be allies for sins against extremist orthodoxy. For Alabama Republicans to join the mob would be shameful.”
Hillyer is a nationally known columnist and author who has been published in conservative magazines and journals for decades.
The resolution before the Alabama Republican Executive Committee claims that Cheney “has repeated Speaker Pelosi’s false and inflammatory allegations regarding our President, encouraged his impeachment, and inflamed divisions within our country, and these actions are against the majority values of our Republican Party.”
The resolution was submitted by former state Rep. Perry Hooper Jr. of Montgomery, Jeana Boggs of Elmore County and Ann Bennett of Lee County.
The resolution is non-binding but would be sent to the six House Republicans in Alabama’s congressional delegation as well as all the other 50 Republican executive committees in the country, including Cheney’s native Wyoming.
On Tuesday, the Senate rejected a motion by Sen. Rand Paul, R-Kentucky, to dismiss the case against President Trump. Only five Republicans voted with Senate Democrats to reject Paul’s motion. This is far short of the two-thirds majority of the Senate that is needed to convict the President and strongly suggests that Trump will not be convicted when his trial is held in February.
The 400 member Alabama Republican Executive Committee meets on Feb. 27 in Montgomery.
