The thing about Liz Cheney
Kamala Harris campaigns with a once-impossible ally – and J.D. Vance lies about the 2020 election again
Hello! There are 32 days till election day.
Things to know
🚨 The politicisation of Hurricane Helene continues, with Donald Trump repeating the lie that the federal government is refusing to step up and fully fund the recovery. So bad is the disinformation problem that FEMA, which is managing the emergency response, has put launched a Rumour Response page to dispel false claims about what’s happening. This is unlikely to stop far-right figures like Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor “Jewish space laser” Greene from running wild with deranged conspiracy theories:
🙅🏼♀️ The cause of safeguarding women’s reproductive freedom got an unlikely boost from Melania Trump, who is using the same vocabulary as Kamala Harris and framing the right to abortion as a matter of “freedom”.
More than a few cynical observers suspect this is part of a ploy to soften her husband’s image on the issue, given he has vacillated on whether or not to sign a national abortion ban and tried hard to distance himself from Project 2025 – an agenda that includes shutting off access not just to abortion, but to contraception. (Donald claims he told Melania she could say and write what she liked.)
🗳️ There may be four-and-a-half weeks till election day, but this thing is very much underway. According to the University of Florida Election Lab, 1,207,861 people have already voted, nearly 75% of them by mail, with more than 46 million postal ballots already requested. Caveat: nobody knows for sure what implications these numbers will actually have.
Urgency makes strange bedfellows
It’s been a few weeks since former congresswoman Liz Cheney said she would be voting for Kamala Harris, but yesterday, she actually went so far as to introduce the vice president at a campaign event in Wisconsin, delivering a characteristically grave and pointed speech about just how serious a threat Donald Trump and the increasingly warped Republican Party pose to the future of the US and its democracy.
Harris followed up Cheney’s remarks with a strikingly generous speech of her own. In one key passage, she not only extolled her fellow traveller’s belief in putting country above party, but went so far as to thank another endorser: her own vice presidential predecessor, Cheney’s father:
It is my profound honour, my profound honour to have your support. And I also want to thank your father, Vice President Dick Cheney, for his support, and what he has done to serve our country.
Every endorsement matters. And this endorsement matters a great deal, and it carries a special, special significance. Because as you said, we may not see eye to eye on every issue, and we are going to get back to a healthy two party system – I am sure of that – where we will have vigorous debates.
Not long ago, invoking Dick Cheney’s service to the US in a speech about restoring the health of democracy would have been unimaginable, and not just for a Democrat.
The Bush-Cheney administration was not only deeply unpopular by its end, but also deeply perverse in many of its domestic and foreign dealings. And Liz Cheney herself remains wedded to many of the ideas that took hold in that era; most glaringly, she still insists that waterboarding – that is, terrorising prisoners with simulated drowning – does not constitute torture.
Her support for Harris stems from what is clearly an earnest belief in the rule of law. Yet one of the most chilling questions explored by her father’s administration was whether the president can lawfully order brutal interrogations that would be illegal in most circumstances.
That particular saga was a complicated and shadowy one, but in a nutshell, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld came down on the side of yes – while much of the country, and the world, was appalled when the White House’s legal advice to that effect became public.
It was the sheer darkness of the Bush-Cheney administration and its slipperiness in fessing up to its actions that helped create the conditions for Barack Obama’s victory in 2008. Harris is now rousing a similar energy as she argues for turning the page on Trump. “We are not going back,” she insists every campaign stop.
Nobody of note in either party has ever been keen to go back to the abuses of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al, but so awful was Trump’s reign that their administration now seems like an era of steady, responsible governance rather than a protracted assault on human rights and international law.
If these are the “vigorous debates” Kamala Harris and Liz Cheney want us to get back to, it’s important to remember what debating the legality of physical abuse by the CIA felt like at the time.
Living in denial
J.D. Vance managed to stay elusive at his debate with Tim Walz when asked about the reality of the 2020 election, but he still hasn’t developed the discipline to keep his views on the matter under his hat.
Collared by a journalist this week and asked again whether Trump won the election (which he of course did not), Vance said yes – before clamming up, perhaps realising he’d gone too far.
(Source: The Good Liars)
Now, Vance’s stance on 2020 and the ensuing insurrection has never been much of a secret; he has, after all, made clear that had he been in Mike Pence’s shoes as vice president, he would have gone along with the plan to wreck the certification of the legitimate result via the presentation of votes from fake electors.
But his continued denial of the reality of what happened in that election and on January 6th, 2021 looks particularly cynical after this week, which saw the unsealing of a key filing in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s case accusing Trump of fomenting an effort to overthrow a legitimate election and declining to intervene when it became violent.
The examples of Trump’s conduct that Smith presents as evidence make for chilling reading. Citing this summer’s Supreme Court decision, Trump insists he is immune from Smith’s charges because he was acting in his capacity as president – but the filing makes clear this argument will be hard to defend:
The defendant asserts that he is immune from prosecution for his criminal scheme to overturn the 2020 presidential election because, he claims, it entailed official conduct. Not so. Although the defendant was the incumbent president during the charged conspiracies, his scheme was fundamentally a private one.
The full brief (in PDF format) can be read here. Trump’s reaction when it was released was fully in character: instead of addressing the contents, he claimed that the unsealing itself is illegal and further delegitimises Smith’s case. This is, of course, a lie.
And finally
Liz Cheney isn’t the only grandee getting behind the Harris-Walz ticket this week: also signing on is Bruce Springsteen, whose rugged-yet-kind brand of masculinity throws Trump and Vance’s smirking, suited cruelty into sharp relief.
“This is one of the most consequential elections in our nation's history,” his message reads. “Perhaps not since the Civil War has this great country felt as divided as it does. It doesn't have to be this way.”
You can watch the short clip the Harris campaign is circulating here – or you can just watch Springsteen’s all-time greatest performance below.