The Cheneys Had One Issue the Whole Time

One of the big political realignments of the Donald Trump era has been the return of many, perhaps most, leading neoconservatives to their ancestral homes in the Democratic Party. The ideological descendants of Scoop Jackson have made peace with a party that is in many respects more radical than the one they deserted under George McGovern, all because it no longer calls for America itself to come home.

Liz Cheney has been on the campaign trail with Vice President Kamala Harris in the closing days of the 2024 presidential race. Neither she nor her father share the above lineage, exactly. Dick Cheney was chief of staff to Gerald Ford, was a member of the House Republican leadership team under Ronald Reagan, was secretary of defense under George H.W. Bush, and fatefully the vice president to George W. Bush who really was the last voice in the room during the decision to invade Iraq. He was then the highest-ranking member of the Bush 43 administration to endorse Trump in 2016.

The younger Cheney was a member of the House Republican leadership team while Trump was president. She was estimated to vote with Trump nearly 93 percent of the time they were both in office. While the official narrative is that the Cheneys defected in defense of democracy, fissures appeared over foreign policy well before the 2020 election. Liz Cheney’s track record of success in democratic elections might have continued if she had been willing to navigate the fact that almost 70 percent of her Wyoming constituents voted for Trump. First she lost her leadership position, then her House seat by 37.4 points, all at the hands of Republicans. Liz Cheney was subsequently celebrated as a profile in courage by a new partisan crowd.

That was what was on display as Cheney the younger stumped for Harris with fellow Never Trumpers this week. More or less unbidden, she stuck up for Harris on abortion specifically and joined a misleading attack on the Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade.

“And I think there are many of us around the country who have been pro-life but who have watched what’s going on in our states since the Dobbs decision and have watched state legislatures put in place laws that are resulting in women not getting the care they need,” Cheney said. “And so, I think this—this is not an issue that we’re seeing break down across party lines.”

According to the White House transcript, Cheney volunteered to follow up on Harris’s long-winded remarks on women’s healthcare and, unlike the vice president, brought up Dobbs directly from the top. 

Leaving aside for a moment the fact that some of these problems for women have arisen at least as much from misinformation about various state laws as from Dobbs itself, when the decision was originally handed down, Cheney wrote on social media, “I have always been strongly pro-life. Today’s ruling by the Supreme Court returns power to the states and the people of the states to address the issue of abortion under state law.”

Republicans are currently debating what the most efficacious ways are to “address the issue of abortion” legally. But abortion policy and the last half-century of jurisprudence on the matter have little to do with January 6 or dubious election claims. Cheney here is running against Trump’s successes, not his excesses. And she is doing so in the service of a presidential candidate who would remove from the states and the people the power to regulate abortion in any meaningful way, not just clarify what is permissible under the newly enacted laws.

Perhaps Harris will never get the congressional numbers, especially in the Senate, to do so. It would be nice if her new friends pushed her on the issue, however.

What is evident is that even some of the more conventionally Republican single-issue hawks never cared very deeply about some of the social and economic policies they long championed and are now abandoning. And it is single-issue hawkishness at least as much as any overriding concerns about Trump being uniquely unfit for office that drives them now.

Of course, that might not play in Michigan. So vague talk about allies and half-hearted endorsements of abortion will have to do.