Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) told “Axios on HBO” that she won’t support Democrats in their fight against the GOP’s push for more restrictive voting laws — a sign that she’ll be no hero to the resistance.
Why it matters: Ten days after losing her House Republican post, Cheney is trying to put former President Trump’s Big Lie about the election in a silo. She doesn’t accept the larger context: Republicans spent years fertilizing the soil for voters to believe that voter fraud is rampant.
Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) dodged questions from Axios’s Jonathan Swan about the connection between former President Trump‘s claims of voter fraud in the 2020 election and the widespread Republican state-level efforts to tighten voter requirements.
In an interview airing Sunday on “Axios on HBO,” the congresswoman who lost her position as GOP House conference chair over her continued insistence that Trump lost the election and bears responsibility for the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol responded to questions about the link between the former president’s words and her own party’s efforts to change state voting laws by pointing to individual bills.
Asked by Swan about what existing problems the legislation was meant to address if not the former president’s claims about voter fraud, Cheney demurred that each of the more than 300 bills should be looked at separately.
“Well, I think you have to look at the specifics of each one of those efforts,” she said.
Swan countered that he doesn’t “think anyone doubts” that there is a link between Trump’s claims that the 2020 election was stolen and the new legislation, to which Cheney responded that “everybody” should want a voting system where fraud is prevented.