Former Sen. Jeff Flake, a frequent critic of his own party, said the GOP removed Rep. Liz Cheney from her leadership post for “speaking the truth.”
Flake, who often butted heads with former President Donald Trump while serving as a senator from Arizona, joined other Trump political foes, such as Sen. Mitt Romney and Rep. Adam Kinzinger, in defending Cheney, who was booted from her leadership position by the House GOP caucus for her frequent criticism of the former president.
“Liz Cheney has been removed from House Leadership for speaking the truth,” Flake tweeted after the vote. “In the end, truth will prevail.”
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Prior to Cheney’s ouster, Flake accused the Republican Party of a “steady embrace of dishonesty.”
“She will lose her position because she is refusing to play her assigned role in propagating the ‘big lie’ that the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. Cheney is more dedicated to the long-term health of our constitutional system than she is to assuaging the former president’s shattered ego, and for her integrity she may well pay with her career,” Flake wrote in a Tuesday opinion article for the Washington Post. “No, this is not the plot of a movie set in an asylum. Ladies and gentlemen, this is your contemporary Republican Party, where today there is no greater offense than honesty.”
Flake accused 70% of Republican voters of suffering an “allergy to self-evident truth,” perpetrating “ugly tolerance of the pernicious falsehood[s]” and “bizarre and fanatical fable[s].”
The former senator acknowledged that he didn’t run for reelection in 2018 because he likely would not have survived a primary challenge due to Trump’s popularity with his constituents.
“I had hoped that, over time, my Republican constituents would feel differently about the former president, or at least value a Republican who pushed back, and that I could stand for reelection in 2018 with a reasonable chance of surviving a Republican primary,” he continued. “It soon became apparent that Republican voters wanted someone who was all in with a president that I increasingly saw as a danger to the republic. That could not be me, so I spoke out instead and didn’t stand for reelection.”
Flake served in the Senate from 2013 to 2019. Now a private citizen, he has been among Trump’s critics within the party, and the Arizona GOP censured him in January after he endorsed President Joe Biden’s candidacy in the 2020 presidential election.
Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, was one of 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump on the charge of incitement of insurrection in connection to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, although the Senate later acquitted him. Trump was previously impeached in the House on two Ukraine-related charges in 2019 before being acquitted in the Senate.
The two have clashed ever since, with Cheney saying Trump was no longer the leader of the GOP and refusing to back a potential 2024 presidential bid, and Trump vowing to endorse a primary challenge to Cheney ahead of her 2022 reelection campaign.
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Despite objections from Flake, Romney, and others, most Republicans applauded Cheney’s ouster, saying she no longer represented the position held by the majority of the GOP.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy scheduled a Friday vote to replace Cheney with Rep. Elise Stefanik, a Trump ally whom McCarthy and Trump endorsed for the position.
