Trump Impeachment: did Cheney apologise for voting in favour at the Republican meeting?
House Republican Conference chair Liz Cheney will not lose her position but her support of impeaching Donald Trump has left her at odds with many in the GOP.
The third highest-ranking Republican, Rep. Liz Cheney, has avoided being stripped of her position as the party’s Conference Chair. Cheney was one of few Republicans who voted to impeach former President Donald Trump last month and has faced criticism from other members of the GOP.
A 145 to 61 victory in the secret ballot held on Wednesday night ensured that she fended off a challenge from the more ardent Trump supporters in the party. Despite surviving, Cheney’s experience shows the extent to which Republicans are divided about the direction of a post-Trump future.
What did Cheney say about her vote to impeach Trump?
Liz Cheney is an extremely experienced politician with considerable history within the Republican Party. Her father, Dick Cheney, served as vice president to George W. Bush from 2001 to 2009, and she filled several roles in the State Department during the same administration.
She is known as an ideological Republican and, in her role as Chair of the House Republican Conference, she is outranked by only Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy in the party.
This made her the most prominent Republican to openly blame Trump for the 6 January Capitol Hill riots and she publically supported his impeachment. In a statement released to support the Democrats’ impeachment article, Cheney wrote: “the President of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing.”
Having held this conviction so strongly she has unsurprisingly refused to apologise for her decision to vote to impeach despite mounting pressure against her. Her position was assured on Wednesday by a fairly comfortable margin and she told reporters that it was evidence of unity in the party.
“We’re not going to be divided and we’re not going to be in a situation where people can pick off any member of leadership,” Cheney said after the vote. “It was a very resounding acknowledgment that we need to go forward together.”
Defining day for the Republican Party
Incredibly, the potential removal of the party’s No. 3 was far from the only focus of attention at the conference on Wednesday night. Also on the agenda was the future of Marjorie Taylor Greene, the first-term Representative who has previously forwarded bizarre QAnon conspiracies.
Greene gave a speech to fellow Republican members to explain her position and was reportedly given a standing ovation by around half of those in attendance. Despite being repeatedly called out for promoting anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and expressing support for the killing of Democratic leaders, Greene appeared unfussed in a Washington Examiner interview published on Wednesday.
"Kevin McCarthy and all these leaders, the leadership, and everyone is proving that they are all talk and not about action, and they're just all about doing business as usual in Washington," Greene said.