Liz Cheney Endorses Kamala Harris

Well over more than two decades ago when I was an active Republican, honesty, allegiance to the U.S. Constitution, personal character and integrity, moral decency and the rule of law mattered.  Sadly, in the age of Donald Trump, none of these things matter in today's Republican Party. Today, cult loyalty to Trump, the embrace of racism, homophobia, far right religious extremism and misogyny are the sole factors that matter if one is to remain a Republican.  I continue to be shocked and saddened by the number of former friends and Republican colleagues who have betrayed everything they once claimed to stand for.  These people tend to get their "news" from Fox News - which in its defamation settlement  admitted that it was not a news outlet but instead an entertainment site - and far right ideologues peddling lies and conspiracy theories and seemingly drink the Trump Kool-Aid by the gallon. If one continues to embrace and uphold the the values of the GOP of yesteryear, the only viable option is to leave the Republican Party (as many I know have done) and/or vote Democrat in the hope that electoral defeats will bring the GOP to its senses. One such person is Liz Cheney who announced she will be voting for Kamala Harris in 2024 while underscoring the danger Donald Trump poses to the nation.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at Cheney's endorsement of Harris: 

Liz Cheney, a former congresswoman from Wyoming, broke with the Republican Party on Wednesday to say she plans to vote for Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris in November.

“As a conservative, as someone who believes in and cares about the Constitution, I have thought deeply about this,” Cheney said at an event hosted by Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy in North Carolina. “And because of the danger that Donald Trump poses, not only am I not voting for Donald Trump, but I will be voting for Kamala Harris.”

With her promise of support for Harris, the former congresswoman becomes the latest on a growing list of Republicans who have come out against voting for Trump this fall. Democrats have embraced the GOP defectors, putting several Republican speakers on the Democratic National Convention stage last month — including former lawmaker Adam Kinzinger, who along with Cheney served on the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Once the No. 3 Republican in the House, Cheney voted to impeach Trump for his role in inciting the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol, saying at the time that “there has never been a greater betrayal by a President of the United States of his office and his oath to the Constitution.” Republicans subsequently ousted her from her role as chairwoman of the House Republican Conference in May 2021 because she continued to challenge Trump over his false claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

Trump has been critical of Cheney for years, with tensions forming after she criticized some of his actions as president. In his speech on Jan. 6, 2021, on the National Mall in Washington, before he urged his supporters to march to the Capitol, Trump said of Cheney, “We got to get rid of the weak congresspeople, the ones that aren’t any good, the Liz Cheneys of the world.”

In March, he wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social, that Cheney and the other members of the select committee should go to jail. And in July, he shared another user’s post asserting that Cheney was guilty of treason.

Cheney, who weighed a third-party presidential run earlier this election cycle, emphasized on Wednesday in the battleground state of North Carolina that she does not believe voters have the “luxury” of supporting write-in candidates to protest Trump.

“Because we are here in North Carolina, I think it is crucially important for people to recognize, not only is what I’ve just said about the danger that Trump poses, something that should prevent people from voting for him,” she said. “But I don’t believe that we have the luxury of writing in candidates’ names, particularly in swing states.”

I disagree with Cheney on numerous issues, but I respect her refusal to embrace the indefensible.