quote:

Kevin McCarthy tried to get Liz Cheney to apologize for how she handled her vote to impeach former President Trump before last week's highly anticipated House GOP conference meeting — a request she refused, two people with direct knowledge told Axios.

Why it matters: Cheney rolled the dice, refusing her leader's ask and counting on her supporters to keep her as conference chair, the party's No. 3 post in the House. Newly empowered, she's now embracing her role as the Republicans' Trump critic-in-chief.

quote:

Wyoming Republican Rep. Liz Cheney, who is facing scorn from her party over her statements about former President Donald Trump, called his election fraud falsehood a "big lie" on Monday and slammed fellow Republicans for perpetuating it.

"The 2020 presidential election was not stolen. Anyone who claims it was is spreading THE BIG LIE, turning their back on the rule of law, and poisoning our democratic system," the GOP caucus chair tweeted.

Her tweet came as Trump issued a tweet-like statement dubbing the results of the presidential election "THE BIG LIE," flipping on its head a phrase used during his second House-led impeachment to describe his false claims of voter fraud.

"The Fraudulent Presidential Election of 2020 will be, from this day forth, known as THE BIG LIE!" Trump said Monday in an email.

The former president made the claim in a week with a big implication for him. He was banned or suspended from social media platforms after the Jan. 6 riot. On Wednesday, Facebook's Oversight Board is set to announce its ruling on whether his suspension on the platform should be permanent.

quote:

And according to FiveThirtyEight’s Trump Score, she voted in line with Trump’s position 93 percent of the time. Instead, her main transgression appears to be not going along with the “Big Lie” (and voting to impeach Trump for using it to egg on a violent mob).

quote:

If Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney had a rough start to 2021, it sure wasn’t reflected in fundraising.

According to documents obtained by Cowboy State Daily, Cheney will smash all of her previous quarterly fundraising efforts by raising $1.54 million during the first quarter of 2021.

For context, Cheney raised $321,000 in the first quarter of 2019 — this represents a five-fold increase in fundraising activity.

Also significant is where the money came from, with more than $1 million of the funds coming from individual donors.

This puts Cheney’s cash on hand at $1.43 million — up from $153,000 at the end of 2020.

quote:

Donald Trump is out of the White House — and mostly gone from the public eye — but his grip on the G.O.P. base has probably never been stronger.

In the House, Representative Liz Cheney’s tenure as the No. 3 Republican appears to be coming to an end, thanks to her willingness to stand up to Mr. Trump’s fabrications. With Ms. Cheney on her way out, a new era in G.O.P. politics is being ushered in: As early as next week, every member of the House leadership could be fully committed to a pro-Trump platform.

Which means we’ll continue to hear a lot of false claims about the electoral system being broken — and less emphasis on traditional Republican policy goals.

Representative Elise Stefanik, who’s in line to take Ms. Cheney’s place, is a perfect symbol of the shift. Just over six years ago, at 30 years old, Ms. Stefanik was the youngest woman ever elected to Congress at the time. She did it by flipping an upstate New York district that had sent a Democrat to the House for the past two decades, and since then she has legislated mostly like a moderate.

The staunchly conservative think tank FreedomWorks gave her voting record a score of 37 percent, which it called “dismal” in a tweet on Wednesday. She has actually voted with Mr. Trump far less often than Ms. Cheney has.

But Ms. Stefanik has increasingly played along to his tune, at least rhetorically, and lately she’s become a major defender of his unfounded claims that the 2020 election was stolen. Thus far, the balance she’s struck appears to be working: She has won re-election by double-digit margins three times in a row in a relatively nonideological district, where loyalty to Mr. Trump is becoming the coin of the realm.

quote:

I don't like her. I don't like her family. I don't like her politics.

quote:

But I might send her a few bucks.

quote:

Originally posted by QuirtEvans:
The former guy (what George Conway calls him) needs to go to jail. I hope the NYC D.A. is moving quickly.

quote:

Originally posted by Steve Miller:

quote:

Originally posted by QuirtEvans:
The former guy (what George Conway calls him) needs to go to jail. I hope the NYC D.A. is moving quickly.

One of the blogs I read abbreviates that to TFG, and that’s morphed in to That ******** Guy.

Now I can’t see “the former guy” without thinking about the abbreviation.

quote:

Gov. Larry Hogan, R-Md., criticized those within the GOP who insist they need to double down on keeping former President Donald Trump TFG as its leader despite his loss in 2020, saying that it's part of a “battle for the soul of the Republican Party."

As House Republicans appear ready to remove Rep. Cheney, R-Wyo., from its leadership ranks because of her criticism of Trump TFG and his false claims that the election was stolen from him, Hogan told “Meet the Press” Sunday that the party is becoming a "circular firing squad."

“It bothers me you have to swear fealty to the dear leader or you get kicked out of the party. It just doesn’t make any sense,” Hogan said.