Former Republican congressman Justin Amash said turning Rep. Liz Cheney (R–Wyo.) into a hero “is a bit misguided” arguing that she could have spoken out earlier.
Amash told CNN’s David Axelrod on ‘The Axe Files’ that Cheney should have joined him earlier when he spoke out against Trump.
“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 and became an Independent after voting with Democrats to impeach Donald Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress after a House investigation into allegations Trump withheld aid to Ukraine in exchange for dirt on then-candidate Joe Biden. Amash later became a Libertarian.
Amash said Cheney did not support him then.
Now, Cheney is the one on the outs with the Republican Party after voting to support Donald 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.
Cheney has said she will do anything in her power to make sure Trump never goes anywhere near the Oval Office again. But, Amash is asking why Cheney chose now to speak up about Trump after years of supporting him.
“I say that not as someone who’s saying you can never change, you can never grow, you can never learn, but I’d like to see some real development when people learn,” Amash said.
“Liz Cheney, what is it that you saw that made it so different for you versus how Trump was behaving, say, before Jan. 6?” he continued. “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. And I think that’s a huge problem because it lets people get away with things,” Amash added.
Cheney was one of ten Republicans in the House that voted to impeach Donald Trump for inciting an insurrection after his supporters stormed the Capitol on January 6, intent of stopping the certification of Joe 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 unlike other Republican Party leaders like Sen. Mitch McConnell, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and even Sen. Lindsey Graham.
“I really believe that if she had not seen the whole party moving, she would not have moved either. 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,” Amash said.
