Lame duck Liz

OPINION:

Freshman Rep. Peter Meijer, Michigan Republican, had been in office just 10 days before voting for the baseless impeachment in January 2021 of former President Donald Trump, who was falsely charged with fomenting the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.

As a direct result, Mr. Meijer lost his bid for renomination for a second term in the Aug. 2 Michigan GOP primary.

John Gibbs, the Trump-backed challenger who beat him, tweeted the following during the campaign: “By voting to impeach President Trump … RINO Peter Meijer chose to be fawned over by the media & the D.C. establishment instead of doing what’s right & representing those who voted for him.”

But the liberal mainstream media and Washington establishment’s fawning treatment of Mr. Meijer paled by comparison to the sycophantic coverage accorded to Rep. Liz Cheney, Wyoming Republican, whose unhinged anti-Trump rants as vice chair of the Jan. 6 committee kangaroo court rendered her indistinguishable from the seven leftist Democrats on the panel.

So, fittingly, on Tuesday, two weeks after Michigan GOP voters sent Mr. Meijer packing, their Wyoming counterparts sent their own version of Mr. Gibbs’ message, loud and clear, to Ms. Cheney.

Despite cynically urging Wyoming Democrats to reregister as Republicans so they could vote for her in the GOP primary, the three-term Ms. Cheney, 56, was absolutely crushed by her pro-Trump challenger, lawyer Harriet Hageman, 66.3% to 28.9%.

Ignoring her constituents and the issues of concern to Wyoming voters, Ms. Cheney monomaniacally vowed to do everything in her power to keep Mr. Trump from ever returning to the White House. That’s despite representing ruby-red Republican Wyoming, which gave Mr. Trump 69.94% of its vote in the 2020 presidential election — a greater share than any other state.

Inexplicably, Ms. Cheney has been far harsher in her criticism of Mr. Trump, a fellow Republican, than she has been of his Democratic successor, President Biden. She has been silent on Mr. Biden’s far-left policies, which have given us a parade of horribles over the past 18 months: record-high gasoline prices; 40-year-high rates of inflation; soaring violent crime and rampant homelessness in our cities; hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants streaming every month across our wide-open southwest border; and more.

“Liz Cheney has turned her back on us to pursue her own personal war with President Trump, and we are fed up with having no one to stand up for us in the House of Representatives against the disastrous policies of the Biden administration,” Ms. Hageman rightly observed last month.

Ms. Cheney’s misplaced priorities clearly weren’t lost on Wyoming GOP primary voters. Nor was the fact that she voted on June 24 in favor of the Democrats’ new gun-control law (anathema in the Cowboy State) and on July 19 in support of Democrats’ radical, misleadingly named Respect for Marriage Act.

Clearly aware of the electoral drubbing she was facing, Ms. Cheney earlier this month hubristically framed it as quasi-martyrdom, telling The New York Times, “If the cost of standing up for the Constitution is losing the House seat, then that’s a price I’m willing to pay.”

And lose it, she did, despite significantly outraising and outspending Ms. Hageman. Ms. Cheney’s haul of about $15 million included hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations from Hollywood and Silicon Valley leftists, among them movie mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg and Google’s Vint Cerf, who both admitted they agreed with Ms. Cheney on little other than their shared hatred of Mr. Trump.

Unchastened in defeat, Ms. Cheney doubled down, telling a paltry gathering of supporters in an ungracious concession speech less than 90 minutes after the polls closed: “I have said I will do whatever it takes to ensure that Donald Trump is never anywhere near the Oval Office, and I mean it.”

Her blowout loss presumably takes one form of “whatever it takes” off the table; namely, the ludicrous “Cheney 2024” presidential boomlet — even if it was never anything more than self-aggrandizement on her part and self-delusion on the part of her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney. (Mr. Cheney preposterously claimed in a campaign ad for his daughter that Mr. Trump was the biggest threat the nation has faced in its 246-year history.)

Ms. Cheney’s defeat was also a crushing loss for the Establishment wing of the GOP (of which the Cheneys are platinum-card members) and for the Washington “uniparty,” but a big win for the average American.

Now that she’s a lame duck, Ms. Cheney’s value as a “useful idiot” for Democrats on the Jan. 6 committee show trial going forward will be minimal. She shouldn’t be surprised if they suddenly “unfriend” her on Facebook.

But don’t be surprised if the soon-to-be former lawmaker is given a soft landing, perhaps a job as a talking head on ultraliberal MSNBC, already home to at least three Trump Derangement Syndrome-suffering RINOs — Joe Scarborough, Nicolle Wallace and Michael Steele.