AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta
- Rep. Liz Cheney has taken a bold stance against Trump's election lies but not their direct consequences.
- In an Axios interview, Cheney declined to acknowledge the link between Trump's lies and new laws.
- GOP-controlled legislatures are passing laws tightening rules for voters and election officials.
- See more stories on Insider's business page.
Rep. Liz Cheney stood up to former President Donald Trump, denounced his election lies, and voted to impeach him over the January 6 Capitol insurrection – a stance that contributed to her own caucus ousting her as GOP conference chair, the third-highest position among House Republicans.
But, despite being hailed as a hero and martyr in some circles for standing up to Trump and accepting the consequences, Cheney appears to be far less willing to decry the codification of those lies into law as is currently being carried out by Republicans in state legislatures around the country.
In a recent interview on "Axios on HBO" with Jonathan Swan, Cheney reiterated that she tells constituents that Trump lost the 2020 presidential election fair and square, a loss confirmed by dozens of judges and the Electoral College.
But she demurred when Swan asked her what responsibility "Republican elites" like herself hold in "fertilizing the ground" by saying that requiring an ID to vote, for example, shouldn't be controversial.
"Well, except they're linked," Swan said. "Voter fraud, from everything we can tell, is vanishingly rare. But yet, Donald Trump focused his campaign on this idea that fraud is rampant. You don't see any linkage between Trump saying the election's stolen and Republicans in all of these state legislature rushing to put in place these restrictive voter laws?"
"Well, I think you have to look at the specifics of each one of those efforts," Cheney replied. "I think if you look at the Georgia laws, for example, there's a lot that's been said nationally about the Georgia voter laws that turns out not to be true."
Swan then pointed out how Georgia's Republican Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan said that the push for Georgia's Senate Bill 202 kicked off in earnest after Rudy Giuliani lodged false claims of fraud before the state Senate. "I don't think anyone doubts that the reason that 400-some voting bills have been introduced, 90% by Republicans ... I don't think it's a coincidence after the election that this has happened," Swan added.
Cheney emphasized that she believes common-sense measures are needed to secure elections, prompting Swan to press her on the issue.
"What problem are they solving for? What are all these states doing? What was the big problem in Georgia that needed to be solved by a new law? What was the big problem in Texas? What was the big problem in Florida? These laws are coming all around in the states, and what are they solving for?" he asked.
After Cheney said again that states should be looked at individually, Swan pointed out: "You can't divorce them from the context."
AP Photo/Lynne Sladky
New state laws crack down on election officials.
Cheney is correct that the specifics of these laws vary state-by-state, and many aspects of Georgia's voting bill have been exaggerated and misrepresented by some Democratic politicians and media outlets.
But she sidestepped the crux of the matter raised by Swan: aspects of Trump's lies and provisions addressing the former president's specific complaints are being codified into law state-by-state even though Trump himself is out of office.
By the admission of many state lawmakers, those laws and many of their provisions are enacted in direct response to lies about fraud in the 2020 election. Many are solutions in search of problems - including restrictions that have little chance of actually helping Republicans rebuild the party as Cheney wants to do.
A bulk of the national conversation has framed those GOP-led bills in terms of their effects on voters and activists labeling them as voter suppression. But many of the bills enacted take direct aim at the election officials who were attacked and derided for certifying election results, a trend that cannot be ignored or separated from Trump's lies and onslaughts on these local officials.
Georgia's SB 202, for example, has more consequential impacts on election officials than voters.
The bill demoted Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger from president to a non-voting, ex-officio member of the State Elections Board, giving the GOP-controlled state legislature the power to appoint the chair, and in turn, gave the board broader ability to discipline and temporarily remove local election officials for misconduct.
The law also bans local election officials from accepting private grants, as many did in 2020 to shoulder the costs of running elections in a pandemic, prohibits the state elections board from entering into consent decrees and settlements, and places other potentially onerous and expensive requirements on local officials.
Florida also has a new election omnibus law, Senate Bill 90. The bill bans local election officials from accepting private grants, which Gov. Ron DeSantis derisively termed "Zuckerbucks," limits their ability to enter into legal settlements, and levies fines on local officials who offer more than the allowed number of ballot drop boxes. All 67 of Florida's county-level election supervisors publicly opposed the bill, which was signed into law on May 6.
Previous versions of election-related bills proposed in the ongoing legislative session in Texas included sanctions for election officials for removing partisan poll watchers from voting sites and banned them from sending out absentee ballot applications unsolicited.
As Politico reported, Republicans who spearheaded the official sanction of election lies are running in secretaries of state races - vying for the role of chief election officials in their states - in 2022, which could further threaten the ability of Democratic wins to be properly certified as they were in 2020.
Republicans have for years peddled in lies about rampant voter fraud to justify legislative solutions for non-existent problems, paving the way for Trump to not only win the White House but also perpetuate lies about stolen elections -all of which resulted in the inflection point that was the 2020 presidential election.
At the end of the day, this means that anti-Trump Republicans like Cheney cannot deny or separate the clear remnants of those lies. Their consequences are poised to become much larger and fester far more deeply in the foundation of American democracy than Trump himself.