Liz Cheney’s ‘Great Task’

Within hours of Liz Cheney’s failed bid for reelection to Congress from Wyoming, our Russell Payne reports, the lame-duck congresswoman converted her campaign finance committee into a political action committee. “Liz Cheney for Wyoming” became “The Great Task.” The idea, Politico reports, is to educate the American people about the ongoing threat to our Republic and to oppose any Trump campaign for president.The Times, meanwhile, is out with a headline suggesting that Republican voters have “tethered” themselves more to President Trump than to “policy.” The insult is over a front-page story Thursday suggesting that the decision of the party to deny to Ms. Cheney the renomination to Congress “may cement” the GOP to Mr. Trump. The dispatch is a classic begging of the question as Democrats lose sight of what’s happened these past six years.Let’s start with the cementing. The decision of the Republicans in Wyoming to cut Ms. Cheney loose is “the latest sign” the party is “tethered less to specific policies,” the Times argues, “than to whatever Mr. Trump wants at any given time.” Ms. Cheney’s defeat does not cement anything of the kind. It liberates the party from a candidate who, however gutsy and sincere, allied herself with Democrats pressing a bitter leftist agenda. Mr. Trump remains the leading opponent of the Democrats’ program. Our guess is that Mr. Trump’s platform — ending appeasement of Iran, curtailing abortion, strictly enforcing the immigration laws, rejecting the Paris Climate Accord, enforcing the Jerusalem Embassy Act, and, vitally, tax cuts, sound money, free market growth, deregulation — bothers Democrats more than Mr. Trump’s alleged crimes. We’re not here to belittle those alleged crimes. They would be huge, particularly if Mr. Trump were found to be guilty. That might happen. Yet it’s no small thing that a special prosecutor declined to charge Mr. Trump in respect of any of the matters it investigated. And that on both occasions on which Mr. Trump was tried in the Senate for high crimes or misdemeanors, he was acquitted — meaning, determined to be “not guilty.” The story that the Democrats want to tell is that Mr. Trump doesn’t stand for either policies or principles. We speak in our capacity as a newspaper that twice endorsed Mr. Trump for president precisely on his penchant for solid, Republican policies and principles. They are clear, oft-stated, and almost without exception substantively different from what’s on offer from even the most reasonable of the Democrats.So the idea that what Republicans are tethered to is an individual rather than a set of principles and policies is obnoxious. It is the same error Mrs. Clinton made in running against Mr. Trump, reflected by her condescending view of his voters as “deplorables.” The former state secretary opted to run against the man and not his policies, a strategic error that is hard to overstate and that was rejected on the hustings.If that is going to be the strategy of Ms. Cheney’s campaign for president, she is, in our opinion, setting herself up for another failure. If she is to run on the Reaganite, Trumpite Republican principles that she professes, she would have to turn to the base she has just accused of turning its back on the Constitution. We ask: With which principles and platform planks of Mr. Trump does she disagree?

Liz Cheney’s ‘Great Task’

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