Cheney makes strong case against Trump, weak one for Harris
By Ramesh Ponnuru
Columnist
Given that she has spent the last few years decrying the threat that Donald Trump poses to our constitutional order, Liz Cheney’s endorsement of Kamala Harris came as no shock. Nor is it surprising that the Trump campaign responded with a fact-free tirade that ignored the substance of Cheney’s argument. But that doesn’t mean the former Republican congresswoman’s case for Harris is entirely convincing.
Asked about Cheney’s stance, GOP vice-presidential nominee JD Vance said that her “entire career has been about sending other people’s children off to fight and die for her military conflicts” and accused her and Harris of getting “rich when America loses wars instead of winning wars”.
Vance offered no evidence for either statement or even for the implied claim that Cheney’s endorsement was primarily motivated by foreign policy concerns. If opposition to Donald Trump’s foreign policy was what moved her, then it was peculiar for her to support his election in 2016 and again in 2020. Trump was less inclined to intervene abroad than the Democrats back then, too. What’s different since the 2020 election is that, in the interim, Trump campaigned to overturn its result, culminating in a riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. That’s the core of Cheney’s stated case against Trump.
Her political trajectory during the Trump years has been the opposite of Vance’s. She supported Trump even while Vance was likening him, in private, to Adolf Hitler. Now, the two have switched places. Vance’s shift has worked out well for his career, to say the least: It got him into the Senate and then onto a presidential ticket. People who are appalled by his turn see him as a cynic who believes in nothing. I suspect, though, that he genuinely believes that what he is doing now will ultimately benefit Americans.
Cheney has evidence for the sincerity of her move: It did not coincide with her self-interest. If she had decided to let Trump’s lies about 2020 slide — to keep her objections private, as most Republican representatives who shared them did — she would likely still be in the House GOP leadership today. Instead, she voted to impeach Trump and served on a committee to investigate the events leading to the Capitol riot. It cost her what had been a safe House seat and led to such intense hostility from Republicans that leading members of her own party do not hesitate to launch absurd personal attacks against her. Very few people in our politics have been as willing to pay such costs for something they believe.
Cheney’s hits against Trump land. There are, however, two holes in her argument for Harris. The first is the inevitable gap between the circumstances of the individual voter and those of the country as a whole. The country faces a binary choice between Trump and Harris, but the individual does not.
Cheney says that Trump poses so great a threat that she doesn’t “believe we have the luxury of writing in candidates’ names, particularly in swing states”. Even in swing states, though, one person’s vote is unlikely to determine the election. If that person objects to both major candidates, why not use legal means to express that view?
The more important problem is that Cheney, while professing her continued conservatism, sidestepped conservative concerns about Harris in her endorsement. The closest she came was clarifying that she was not speaking “as someone who agrees with policies on the left most of the time”. As she describes it, then, she has mere policy differences with Harris but grave constitutional objections to Trump. That framing makes her choice too easy.
Harris has endorsed term limits for the Supreme Court. What that means — according to the leading Democratic bill on the subject, which has occasioned no whisper of disagreement from Harris — is stripping Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Clarence Thomas of their ability to take part in most constitutional cases. What’s more, it means doing so without constitutional amendment. Never mind that the Constitution says that federal judges hold their offices for life unless they are impeached and removed by Congress. A supermajority of Senate Democrats, including their leader, Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.), has also sponsored legislation to force the courts to violate Supreme Court rulings.
These would be radical and dangerous changes in our form of government. Someone with a conservative view of the Constitution, as Cheney insists she is, should also be alarmed by the goal of this change: the destruction of the court’s conservative supermajority. Even if that goal were pursued by normal means, such as judicial appointments, most conservatives rightly find it inimical to the Constitution.
It is always possible that a President Kamala Harris would not really try to oust judges who disagree with her, or that a Republican Senate would restrain her. But Trump apologists have offered similar assurances about his risks, and the point of Cheney’s argument was to provide something more than just a difference in the degree of danger between them. And besides, she is also campaigning for Democratic senators.
The tragedy of this election, for conservatives and everyone else, is that Cheney’s case against Trump is strong — but her case for Harris isn’t.
The article first appeared on The
Washington Post.