House Republicans Wednesday will battle for the future of their own party in a closed-door meeting that could decide the fate of the No. 3 leader, Rep. Liz Cheney.
Cheney, who voted last month to impeach then-President Donald Trump, faces stiff backlash from the far-right, pro-Trump wing of the conference. At the same time, GOP lawmakers are fighting to steer the party away from the influence of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a pro-Trump Georgia Republican whose embrace of conspiracy theories has prompted Democrats to consider an unusual vote to strip her of critical committee assignments.
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, a California Republican, sits in the middle of the conflict, hoping to steer the conference away from the civil war.
“Tomorrow is an important moment for the Republican Conference and the Republican Party,” a GOP aide told the Washington Examiner. “It’s going to be an inflection point as to which direction the party is going to go moving forward.”
Outrage at Cheney started soon after the House impeachment vote, with Rep. Andy Biggs, chairman of the House Freedom Caucus, saying that she should resign as chairwoman of the Republican Conference. Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan then said that there should be a vote on whether she should stay in a leadership position. Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz traveled to Wyoming to hold an anti-Cheney rally.
A defiant Cheney responded, “I’m not going anywhere.” And she has gotten public support from many of those in her caucus, as well as from Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who called her “a leader with deep convictions and the courage to act on them.”
McCarthy, who voted against impeaching Trump, does not support efforts to oust Cheney, though with a qualifier: “I support her, but I also have concerns,” he told Full Court Press last month. “She took a position as a No. 3 member in the conference, she never told me ahead of time, and one thing about leadership is that we’re gonna work together, we should understand we know that this is going to become a difficulty. She can have a difference of opinion.”
Without the support of the minority leader, the anti-Cheney group is thought to need support from two-thirds of the conference to force a vote on whether Cheney should remain in her position.
And that would be only after 20% of the conference, 43 people, sign a petition to force a special meeting. No such petition has been delivered yet, but members have been away from Washington for the last week.
Alternatives that could satisfy those peeved at Cheney without removing her include McCarthy persuading Cheney to apologize to the conference at Wednesday’s meeting.
The controversy over Cheney, a conservative establishment figure, is made awkward by the simultaneous controversy over Greene.
Last week brought a resurfacing of statements and social media interactions, including when her Facebook page “liked” a 2019 post saying that “a bullet to the head” would be a “quicker” way to remove House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. She has also suggested that there was no evidence that a plane actually crashed into the Pentagon on 9/11, promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory before distancing herself from it, and engaged in false flag theories about school shootings.
McCarthy is set to talk to Greene on Tuesday, but some Republicans and many Democrats say that she should be removed from committees or from Congress altogether.
Reprimanding Cheney without doing so to Greene, rejecting an establishment conservative in favor of a conspiracy theory-prone extremist, would send a signal about the future of the party that some members might not be able to stomach.
