It seems clear that Liz Cheney needs to find some way to fill her time between January 6 Committee meetings while she waits to begin collecting unemployment checks in January. Yesterday she managed to keep busy by speaking at an event hosted by the McCain Institute at Arizona State University. In addition to once again railing against the Bad Orange Man, Cheney added a new bit of spin to her pitch. She declared that she opposed Republican Kari Lake in the race to be Arizona’s next governor. She also blasted the Republican candidate for Secretary of State, state Rep. Mark Finchem. Why doesn’t she want these two members of her former party to win? Because they both represent a “huge risk for democracy” or something. Of course, by supporting those candidates’ opponents, she is also endorsing the liberal Democratic platform by default. (Associated Press)

Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney on Wednesday said the Republican candidates for Arizona governor and secretary of state pose a huge risk for democracy because both say they will refuse to certify election results if they don’t like the results.

Cheney, a prominent critic of former President Donald Trump and one of just 10 U.S. House Republicans who voted to impeach him after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, made the comments at an event organized by the McCain Institute at Arizona State University.

Cheney also leveled broadsides as what she said was a growing “Putin wing” of the Republican Party who want America to withdraw from the world stage and refuse to defend freedom in other countries.

Cheney’s primary claim regarding what’s “wrong” with Kari Lake – perhaps her only complaint – is that she will supposedly refuse to certify the results of any election where she “doesn’t like” the result. Of course, that’s not what Kari Lake has said. During one interview last year she did say that she wouldn’t have certified the result of the 2020 election, but that’s because she did not feel that the results were accurate. There will be some election results this year that every official around the country “won’t like,” but that doesn’t mean that any of them should be overturned.

So let’s see what sort of positions Liz Cheney is endorsing by supporting Katie Hobbs over Kari Lake. Hobbs is basing much of her campaign on overturning any bans on abortion. She was “outraged” over the recent Supreme Court decision regarding New York State’s concealed carry law and wants much stricter gun control in Arizona. She has an expansive climate change plan to redefine how people in her state conduct their affairs. The list goes on from there.

Does any of that sound like something that actual conservatives support? Does that sound like anything that Liz Cheney would have supported at any point in her career prior to her war with Donald Trump? Her father must be aghast at the thought.

Last week I went on never-Trumper Joe Walsh’s podcast after he invited me to debate the entire never-Trump phenomenon. We had a great discussion and you can listen to it here if you like. We discussed precisely this issue of conflating a person’s opposition to Trump with a tacit endorsement of liberal principles. As I told Walsh, you really can’t separate the individuals from the policies. If you are working to stop one candidate, you are by definition working to help their opponent. And that means you are pushing for the policies the opponent embraces. Joe even admitted (as he has in the past) that he knows he is supporting liberal policies he disagrees with, but he feels the principle of “defending democracy” outweighs those concerns.

But that explanation simply doesn’t wash, or at least it doesn’t for me. Sooner or later, Donald Trump will be gone from the political scene. (He’s younger than Joe Biden, but he’s still no spring chicken, after all.) Biden will be gone as well, along with all of the other Democrats and Republicans currently vying for office. But the policies embraced by the liberal and conservative wings of the American electorate will remain. And the damage that can be done over the course of even a single term in office by someone you helped elect just because it might hurt the Bad Orange Man’s feelings is considerable.

If there is anyone out there who was more “broken” by Donald Trump than Liz Cheney, I’m hard-pressed to think who they might be. And that’s a shame because at one time she was almost entirely accepted as a rock-ribbed conservative, even if she was more of a neoliberal globalist in some respects, particularly on foreign policy.