On the eve of House Republicans planning to vote on removing Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney from her No. 3 leadership position, Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy registered his support for the move but blasted the front-runner choice for her replacement: New York Rep. Elise Stefanik.
“With all due respect to my friend, Elise Stefanik, let us contemplate the message Republican leadership is about to send by rushing to coronate a spokesperson whose voting record embodies much of what led to the 2018 ass-kicking we received by Democrats,” Roy wrote in a Tuesday letter to colleagues obtained by the Washington Examiner.
He cited Stefanik’s votes against the 2017 tax cut bill and funding a wall on the southern border while voting in favor of overriding former President Donald Trump’s policy on transgender troops and the Equality Act in 2019, among other measures.
Trump, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, and House Minority Whip Steve Scalise have all expressed their support for making 36-year-old Stefanik the House Republican Conference chairwoman after removing Cheney from the messaging-focused role.
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But Stefanik, despite standing in contrast to Cheney on matters of election integrity and helping with Trump’s impeachment defense, has prompted some opposition from conservatives.
The American Conservative Union gives Stefanik a lifetime rating of 44%, compared to 78% for Cheney, while Heritage Action gives Stefanik a 48% lifetime score, compared to 80% for Cheney. The economically free-market, free-trade Club for Growth said in a tweet that Stefanik “is NOT a good spokesperson for the House Republican Conference.”
Roy joined with McCarthy and Scalise in opposing keeping Cheney, a frequent Trump critic, in her position.
“From a position specifically designed to speak for all of us, she has been looking backwards while repeatedly and unhelpfully engaging in personal attacks and finger-wagging towards President Trump rather than leading the conference forward with a unifying message both on elections and more broadly,” Roy said of Cheney in the memo.
But he pushed back against Cheney’s assertion that objections to her leadership consist entirely of her position, which she frequently articulated, that the election was not stolen and that Trump lost fair and square.
“This is about her general failure to lead the conference — recognizing the real concerns with expanded mail-in ballots, lack of identification requirements, ballot harvesting, and the numerous ways to undermine elections — on a path forward to restore election integrity. This is the kind of unified ‘election’ message that Liz unfortunately did not develop that we should embrace now,” Roy said.
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Read the full memo below:
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