Cheney: Johnson Should Be Willing to Lose Speakership Over Ukraine Aid

Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) told CNN’s Jake Tapper on the State of the Union program Sunday that House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) should consider getting military aid to Ukraine in its war with Russia to be more important than his continuing to serve as Speaker of the House.

When Tapper suggested that Johnson might very well face a motion to “vacate the chair,” the same type of motion that ended former Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s brief tenure, were he to even bring a Ukraine bill to the floor, Cheney retorted, “Right, and what I would say to that is, you know, he ought to understand that it is worth it if he has to lose his speakership in order to make sure that freedom survives, in order to make sure that the United States of America continues to play its leadership role in the world.”

A bill providing $60 billion in aid for Ukraine — and $14 billion in security assistance to Israel — passed the Senate last week. But it was the aid to Ukraine that was Cheney’s main focus, as she said that Johnson needs to take action “to help the Ukrainian people.”

She added, “And again, he’s gonna have to explain to future generations, to his kids, to his grandkids, whether or not he did what was right, whether or not he was a force for good and aided the cause of freedom, or whether he continued down this path of cowardice and doing what Donald Trump and [Russian President Vladimir Putin] want him to do.”

Johnson has already rejected bringing the bill to the floor in the House, but he did not mention that his reluctance to do so was out of deference to either Trump or Putin. Members of the House Freedom Caucus have warned that a vote for the aid package would precipitate a vote to remove him from his speaker’s post.

Cheney argued, “You got to read what’s happening in Ukraine today, you got to read about the slaughter that’s going on. And you got to understand that we are at a turning point in the history
— not just of this nation, but of the world.”

“The world” appears to be the most important thing to neoconservatives like Cheney, despite her having taken an oath to the U.S. Constitution, not “the world.”

While Cheney did vote conservatively on some issues — she represented a more conservative state, Wyoming, in Congress — she has been her father’s daughter when it comes to favoring one foreign involvement after another. For example, she voted to expand NATO, she opposed bringing troops home from Syria, she has favored more and more military assistance to Ukraine, and she even opposed the repeal of the two-decades-old Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), in which Congress authorized President George W. Bush to invade Iraq.

Ironically, Cheney’s father, then-Vice President Dick Cheney actually tried to persuade Bush that no congressional approval for military action in Iraq was even necessary, and that he could simply go to war on his own.

While Liz Cheney voted to impeach President Donald Trump, she has said nothing about Democratic President Joe Biden’s frequently ignoring the Constitution of the United States.

Cheney said last June that the country continues to elect “idiots,” offering Trump as an example. While her vocal opposition to Trump brought praise from the national media and Democrats, it also cost her reelection to the House of Representatives in 2022, as she could garner only 29 percent of the vote in a Republican primary in Wyoming.

While in Congress, Cheney managed a dismal 57-percent score on TNA’s Freedom Index, which measures the fidelity of a member of Congress to the U.S. Constitution. It was not just foreign affairs that caused Cheney to have such a low score. She also voted for red flag laws — which would have made it easy to take away an individual’s Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms — which were not very popular in the Western rural state of Wyoming.

The problem really isn’t that we keep electing “idiots,” but that so many of our public officials, like Liz Cheney, are just unprincipled individuals who frequently ignore their oath of office to support the U.S. Constitution. Perhaps if they were actual idiots there could be some sympathy for the problem. But Biden and Cheney, along with Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, other Democrats, and far too many Republicans, know exactly what they are doing when they ignore the clear wording of the United States Constitution.

At least an idiot might occasionally make a mistake and vote in favor of limited government and individual liberty.