Former Republican congressman Justin Amash, told CNN’s David Axelrod on ‘The Axe Files’ podcast that turning Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) into a hero “is a bit misguided” arguing that she could have spoken out sooner.
“For a long time, I was warning that the president’s approach could lead to things like violence, could lead to a lot of animosity and contempt, and all sorts of things that would be harmful to our country. She didn’t stand up for that view,” he said. “We had four years where she could have stood up and said, ‘There’s a problem here. What Donald Trump is doing is wrong.”
Amash left the Republican Party in 2019 to become an Independent after voting with Democrats to impeach Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress for withholding aid to Ukraine in exchange for dirt on Joe Biden. Amash later became a Libertarian.
Now, Cheney is facing backlash within the Republican Party for supporting Trump’s second impeachment and refusing to go along with his lie that the election was stolen from him. This resulted in her being removed from GOP House leadership earlier this month.
Why now?
After years of supporting Trump, Amash is asking what is so different now to cause Cheney to turn on the president.
“Liz Cheney, what is it that you saw that made it so different for you versus how Trump was behaving, say, before Jan. 6?” Amash said on Axelrod’s podcast. “I mean, I don’t think there was any radical difference there. It was the same, what, because the outcome was different? Because that was the one time they stormed the Capitol?”
“One of the biggest problems we have in politics is that when someone is inconsistent like that, where they’re doing the wrong thing for four years and then they flip on a dime, there’s a tendency to turn them into heroes,” Amash added. “And I think that’s a huge problem because it lets people get away with things.”
Cheney was one of ten House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump for inciting an insurrection after his supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6 to prevent the certification of Biden’s election victory.
Amash theorized that Cheney made a “miscalculation” that the party was turning away from Trump after the insurrection, and she’s too far gone now to backtrack.
“I really believe that if she had not seen the whole party moving, she would not have moved either,” Amash said. “And that, to me, is indicative of the problem we have in Congress that people are waiting until they feel they’re safe. I think she thought she was safe. She moved. Now she’s got no choice, she can’t backtrack.”
