Insurrection, incompetence and ‘incandescent’ courage: Liz Cheney addresses crowd in Spokane Wednesday

Inside the Republican cloakroom behind the House chamber, then-Rep. Liz Cheney watched on Jan. 6, 2021, as her colleagues walked between tables signing their names to object, state by state, to the certification of the 2020 presidential vote. It was just before the insurrection began.

During a speech Wednesday in Spokane, Cheney recalled watching a Republican congressman pass between the tables, signing his name objecting to elections in multiple states, who finally said, “The things we do for the orange Jesus.”

Around noon that day, as Cheney prepared her remarks arguing that Congress could not constitutionally object to the electoral vote, her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, called her. He was watching President Donald Trump’s speech on the Ellipse to a crowd of supporters, urging them to march on the Capitol.

“Well, the president had just said to the crowd on the Ellipse that, ‘We need to get rid of the Liz Cheneys of the world,’ ” Cheney recalled. “And my dad said to me, ‘You’re in danger, and you need to think about what that means.’ ”

A week after Trump’s supporters stormed the Capitol, Cheney was one of only 10 House Republicans – and the highest-ranking among them, as conference chairwoman – to vote to impeach him. Among those 10, only two are still in office today, including Rep. Dan Newhouse, R-Wash. The rest have since either left office or were ousted by voters, as Cheney was in the 2022 primaries.

Speaking to a crowd of more than 900 in the Spokane Convention Center on Wednesday at an event hosted by Whitworth University as part of its President’s Leadership Forum, Cheney said she had considered the Republican Party her ideological home since she was a child volunteering for President Gerald Ford’s unsuccessful 1976 campaign.

Her first vote was cast for President Ronald Reagan, and much of her career was spent in the administrations of Republican politicians or as a Republican politician herself.

“It is not my home today,” Cheney said. “I believe fundamentally in conservative principles … none of these things, in my view, are being reflected by the Trump administration today.”

During her 30-minute speech and roughly 45-minute Q&A session with Whitworth President Scott McQuilkin, Cheney spoke of the winding road through politics she has taken, from those early days wetting stamps for the Ford campaign – poorly, she noted, and young Cheney was fired for making the letters too damp – to her opposition in recent years to the Trump administration and the threat she believes it represents to democracy.

She spoke also of the fragility of democracy and the necessity for public officials and politicians to adhere to a unifying rule of law.

“Without the safeguards of our system, of our Constitution, there is no political dissent,” Cheney said. “As Abraham Lincoln warned years before he became president, in those circumstances, our country would face the prospect of rule by mob violence, of tyranny. If the rule of law breaks, it cannot be remade.”

Cheney has long been an advocate for America’s intervention overseas and a critic of Trump’s isolationist, America-first foreign policy positions. She argued Wednesday that the White House has deteriorated America’s alliances by calling for the annexation of Canada and Greenland and weakened the deterrent the U.S. had with overseas adversaries.

“We look at the increase in the threats globally, and you want the very best people in positions, like, for example, at the Defense Department, dealing with these issues and understanding how to effectively defend the United States,” Cheney said. “And it isn’t a Republican or Democratic view to look at what’s happening today at the Defense Department and be extremely troubled by it.”

She called Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth inexperienced and unqualified, criticizing his involvement in the sharing of information through the messaging app Signal about an attack in Yemen in unclassified conversations, including with his family members.

“It is a very significant problem, and that’s all happening in a moment where you need our leadership to be very focused on how they can deter and defeat these threats,” Cheney said.

Cheney also condemned the Trump administration’s flouting of judicial orders, such as in March when the White House ignored a judge’s order to turn around two flights containing hundreds of alleged Venezuelan gang members. White House officials have argued that the flights were over international waters when the order came down, and were therefore outside of the court’s jurisdiction.

Cheney specifically touched on a recent unanimous Supreme Court decision ordering the federal government to “facilitate” the return of Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was deported to an infamous maximum-security prison in El Salvador following what the Trump administration has acknowledged was an administrative error. The administration has claimed the Supreme Court decision as a victory, arguing that the government was required to assist in returning Abrego Garcia only if El Salvador permitted it. El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele recently refused to return him in an Oval Office visit.

Trump has since floated the possibility of sending Americans – “home-grown criminals” – to the same El Salvador prison.

“When a president refused to follow a court order to facilitate the release of a man he admits he wrongly imprisoned in a foreign gulag, then he says he would like to deport you as citizens to the gulag, pay attention,” Cheney said in some of her most strongly worded remarks of the morning. “Do not look away because it’s not happening to you or to your family. Recognize autocrats need people to obey.”

Seeming to reflect on the political cost of her own opposition to Trump, Cheney called on the audience to be “incandescent with courage” and to actively participate in politics, whether by voting, running for office or holding elected officials accountable.