Rep. Elise Stefanik couldn’t have chosen a more potent outlet to make her case for replacing Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney as the chairwoman of the House Republican Conference: Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast.
In one of the first major interviews since the 36-year-old New York congresswoman became the favorite of former President Donald Trump and House Minority Whip Steve Scalise to be the new No. 3 House Republican, Stefanik leaned into asserting the need to investigate election systems and scoffed at those in the free-market donor class who are opposed to her candidacy.
Stefanik’s choice of show, hosted by an architect of Trump’s 2016 campaign working to keep the “America First” ideology alive, was in itself a refutation of Cheney, whose frequent quips criticizing Trump and his election fraud claims have frustrated the rest of her conference to the point of preparing to oust her.
Cutting to the crux of frustration that is spurring a second Cheney removal attempt, Stefanik explained her decision to join in objecting to the election results from the state of Pennsylvania on Jan. 6.
WHO IS ELISE STEFANIK, FAVORITE TO REPLACE LIZ CHENEY?
“There was unprecedented unconstitutional overreach. You had a number of states where there were unelected judges and bureaucrats who were rewriting election law in real time,” she said.
Stefanik talked about her alma mater Harvard removing her from a university advisory committee over her Pennsylvania objection: “I’ve experienced cancel culture at Harvard.”
And she gave a thumbs-up to a Republican-commissioned audit and recount effort underway in Arizona, which a Department of Justice official wrote on Thursday might violate federal law.
“I fully support the audit in Arizona,” Stefanik said. “We want transparency and answers for the American people. What are the Democrats so afraid of?”
“It’s not just Arizona,” she continued, noting the monthslong legal battle to determine a winner in New York’s 22nd Congressional District, which Republican Rep. Claudia Tenney narrowly won. “There were major, major issues. Ballots that were mislabeled. The judge was beside himself about many of the mistakes that were made in the absentee ballot process.”
Underneath a wave of high-profile support for Stefanik is an underbelly of opposition to making her the new conference chairwoman, a position that is supposed to be focused on messaging, questioning her conservative credentials.
The economically free-market, free-trade Club for Growth, whose political action committee spent more than $66 million supporting or opposing candidates in the 2020 election cycle, tweeted against the congresswoman on Wednesday.
“Elise Stefanik is NOT a good spokesperson for the House Republican Conference. She is a liberal with a 35% CFGF lifetime rating, 4th worst in the House GOP. House Republicans should find a conservative to lead messaging and win back the House Majority,” the group said.
Cheney, for comparison, had a 65% rating on the group’s 2019 scorecard, while high-profile Freedom Caucus members Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio, Andy Biggs of Arizona, and Chip Roy of Texas had 100% ratings. Cheney also scored higher than Stefanik in American Conservative Union and Heritage Action rankings.
Bannon referenced the Club for Growth’s opposition to Stefanik in his interview when talking about getting tough on the Chinese Communist Party on the origin of the coronavirus, particularly its relation to a Wuhan laboratory. “The donors, clearly, are not enthusiastic about supporting that,” he said.
“I don’t really care about the donors’ viewpoint on this issue,” Stefanik responded. “I care about the impact on the American workers, and no one was hurt more from the COVID pandemic.”
Right-wing populist types dismiss the scorecards that show Cheney getting higher marks than Stefanik, arguing that the measures used to create the conservative scorecards do not include “America First” principles.
But more factions on the libertarian-right are not buying that Stefanik can seriously take on the establishment.
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“Warmonger Rep. Liz Cheney deserves to be removed, and the Republican establishment pulled off a real feat: finding the one swamp creature in Congress even worse to replace her,” said Eric Brakey, a spokesman for libertarian youth organization Young Americans for Liberty. “She is a big spender who supports welfare for dictators, mass surveillance on the American people, and forever wars in the Middle East. Not only is Rep. Stefanik ranked less conservative than Rep. Cheney, but she’s also less conservative than many Democrats in Congress.”
Brakey also said that Stefanik ”tried to recruit a primary challenger against liberty champion Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky” — a charge made in 2019 that Stefanik’s team denied at the time but that the group stands by. Cheney, as it happens, also supported a challenger to Massie in the 2020 primary, a move that frustrated some in her caucus and helped fuel discontent with her leadership that led to the first attempt to remove her as the GOP conference’s leader.
