Cheney calls for renewed civility at Drake talk
,...But she also says Trump must be defeated.
DES MOINES — Former U.S Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., paid tribute to an old political foe Wednesday night —- of her father.
Cheney was presenting a program at Drake University’s Knapp Center, after former U.S. Sen Joe Lieberman passed away earlier in the day.
”He was just the model, exactly what you want in a public servant,” she said, “and someone who committed his life to this nation and to deep thought and principle. He will be sorely missed.”
Lieberman opposed her father, and predecessor in the House, Dick Cheney, for the vice presidency in the 2000 presidential election. They were the respective running mates of then-sitting Vice President Al Gore, the Democratic presidential nominee, and the GOP nominee, Texas Gov. George W. Bush. It was a close, hotly contested race that took a U.S. Supreme Court ruling to decide, in favor of the Bush-Cheney ticket.
Despite the contentiousness of that race, Liz Cheney said her father’s relationship with Lieberman holds lessons for current political discourse.
”The debate that my dad and Joe Lieberman had in 2000 — I remember watching the debate and the commentary afterwards — was really about the substance and the civility of those two men,” Cheney said, and their families became acquainted with each other.
“Boy, anybody who wants to know what it means to be a dedicated patriot and leader of this country ought to spend some time studying Joe Lieberman,” Cheney said, \ drawing applause from a packed house at Drake’s Knapp Center.
Lieberman, who also broke ground in 2000 as the first practicing member of the Jewish faith to win a major party nomination on a presidential ticket, passed away at age 82. Cheney’s father turned 83 in January.
Liz Cheney was at Drake for the annual spring Martin Bucksbaum Distinguished Lecture. The program was a question-and-answer conversation with Drake alum Lee Ann Colacioppo, editor in chief of The Denver Post.
Cheney said she hopes the country can return to the kind of discourse her father and Lieberman engaged in — after GOP nominee in waiting and former President Donald Trump is defeated in the November election.
“I certainly have policy disagreements with the Biden administration,” Cheney said of current President Joe Biden. “I know the nation can survive bad policy. We can’t survive a president who is going to torch the Constitution.”
She also said, “If you elect someone who doesn’t care about the laws, the laws aren’t going to protect you.”
Cheney, a conservative Republican, was vice chair of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by Trump supporters and she supported a second impeachment of the 45th president. He was acquitted of a charge of inciting an insurrection in a Senate trial, on a vote of 57 for conviction and 43 against — 10 votes short of a two-thirds majority required for conviction and expulsion from office.
Cheney was subsequently removed from Republican leadership positions in the House, censured by the Republican National Committee and defeated in a 2022 primary bid for re-election.
Asked if she has any regrets, or if there is anything she would have done differently, Cheney said, “Well, I would not support Donald Trump for president. I don’t have any regrets about the decisions I made after Jan. 6. And to me, it never seemed as though there was really a real choice in the matter.
“In the immediate aftermath of the election, I thought, and I think a lot of Republicans thought, he (Trump) had a right to make challenges in court, but soon the election will be called, Donald Trump will concede, and the country will move on,” Cheney said. “But I think as we got into the middle of November, December, that was not what he was doing.
”I was very surprised,” Cheney said. “I believed that elected officials, for the most part, were good, honorable officials and would do their duty.
”I hope one of the outcomes of this period — after we defeat Donald Trump in November — is that we really do look at how we conduct politics” and that everyone takes responsibility “to incentivize our public officials to engage in substantive debate; be respectful. And I hope we will walk back from the edge of the abyss we’re looking into that has become so divisive and partisan and so toxic in so many ways.
“The vast majority of American voters wants leaders who are responsible, leaders who are serious, leaders who are mature,” Cheney said, “If you think about what unites us as Americans, and what is so magnificent and special about our country, is that we get to choose our leaders, what laws we live under. That is a miraculous blessing.
”And I think most Americans want leaders, and want a president, who won’t just remind us that we are great country, but remind us we are a good country,” she said. “That goodness and compassion and a reverence for our Constitution and for the blessings of this nation, those are things that unite us and bind us beyond party,” Cheney said.
”And I think that when we come though this period, it’s going to be necessary for all of us to decide we’re not just going to be bystanders - make sure we defend this country, we defend this system so we can hand it to our kids,” she said. “That means we have to be involved; we have to be engaged.
”You want your kids to live in a country characterized by the peaceful transfer of power. I don’t care if you’re a Republican or a Democrat,” Cheney said. “We’re in a moment of crisis in many ways. We have to set aside our partisan differences and do everything we can to make sure we do perpetuate that; make sure our kids do grow up in that country. I don’t have any doubt that we’ll succeed.
”And then we can get back to the days of disagreeing about tax policy or whatever it is,” she said. “But let’s make sure we commit ourselves to working together to save the foundations of the republic.”
Pat Kinney is a freelance writer and former longtime news staffer with the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier and, prior to that, several years at the Ames Tribune. He is currently an oral historian with the Grout Museum District in Waterloo. His “View from the Cedar Valley” column is part of “Iowa Writers Collaborative,” a collection of news and opinion writers from around the state who previously and currently work with a host of Iowa newspapers, news organizations and other publications. Click on their links below to sample their work.
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