On CBS Sunday Morning, correspondent John Dickerson sat down with former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney, who has a book to promote. But they also have a shared interest in pushing the idea of Republicans as authoritarians. Predictably, the interview was pillow-soft.
Watch as Cheney dutifully takes Dickerson’s bait, and dutifully offers that Republicans defending Trump do not support the Constitution:
JOHN DICKERSON: After losing her 2022 Republican primary, Cheney traded the U.S. Capitol dome for the Thomas Jefferson-designed rotunda at the University of Virginia, where she has been lecturing on politics and writing a new book, "Oath and Honor."
Let me ask you about that oath. If a person is a member of Congress and they have sworn an oath to defend the Constitution, can they defend the Constitution and also endorse Donald Trump?
LIZ CHENEY: No. It isn’t consistent.
DICKERSON: So they are breaking with their oath by saying they would like him to be the next president?
CHENEY: In my view, you know, fundamentally, there is a choice to be made. You can't be for Donald Trump and for the Constitution. You have to choose.
DICKERSON: It's a lot of people who are choosing Donald Trump.
CHENEY: Yeah. It is.
Oddly enough, and by “oddly” I mean quite customarily, you never hear Acela Media frame a vote for Joe Biden as a vote against the Constitution, despite the fact that his administration is currently being sued for literal First Amendment violations, and has tagged parents opposed to the sexualization of children in schools as “domestic terrorists”.
In this warped worldview, the only authoritarians are Trump and his supporters, who must be stopped by any means necessary. This narrative frame is then turned upon Speaker Mike Johnson, who Cheney singles out in her book. Here, she suggests that Johnson cannot be trusted to preside over an electoral count, and that only a Democrat House can guarantee the 2024 election.
DICKERSON: What happens if Mike Johnson is the speaker on the 6th of January 2025?
CHENEY: He can't be. You know, we are facing a situation with respect to the 2024 election where it's an existential crisis and we have to ensure that we don't have a situation where an election that might be thrown into the House of Representatives is overseen by a Republican majority.
DICKERSON: So you would prefer a Democratic majority?
CHENEY: I believe very strongly in those principles and ideals that have defined the Republican Party, but the Republican Party of today has made a choice and they haven't chosen the Constitution. And so I do think it’s- it presents a threat if the Republicans are in the majority in January 2025.
Cheney's message is vote for Joe Biden, and for Democrats in Congress. Jane Pauley introduced the interview with the words "Call her a very concerned conservative."
The Acela Media’s obsessions with January 6th and with the “authoritarianism” narrative will ensure that Cheney remains in front of their cameras, long after her constituents decided that they’d already heard enough.
Click “expand” to view the full transcript of the aforementioned interview as aired on CBS Sunday Morning on Sunday, December 3rd, 2023:
JANE PAULEY: Call her a very concerned conservative. John Dickerson this morning is talking with Wyoming Republican and former congresswoman Liz Cheney.
JOHN DICKERSON: Give your experience, do you look at politics differently? Do you say, you know, “we spent a lot of time demonizing the other side which put all of our supporters on the mindset of, you know what? They are not just wrong, they are evil”.
LIZ CHENEY: Absolutely. If everything that a political adversary does is met with, you know, an attack that oh, my God, this is, you know, the worst possible thing you could imagine, this is dire, then when you face something that really is dire, like we are facing today with respect to Donald Trump and his efforts to unravel the Republic, people become numb to the truth because they feel like we have heard that so many times before from politicians.
DICKERSON: How do you sound the alarm when people have gotten used to the ringing? That's the challenge for former congresswoman Liz Cheney, who has had to update even they are sense of alarm as Donald Trump's effort to overthrow the last election has not stopped him from becoming the GOP presidential favorite as an election denier has become speaker of the House, and prominent Republicans have come to embrace election conspiracies as the route to political glory.
You once used to say that nobody could challenge your conservative credentials. What if being a conservative today is defined by one thing, your support for Donald Trump?
CHENEY: Well, I know what conservative means, and I think that the most conservative of all conservative values is fidelity to the Constitution. So there certainly are people today who are caught in this cult of personality, but that's the opposite of conservative.
This primary election is over.
DICKERSON: After losing her 2022 Republican primary, Cheney traded the U.S. Capitol dome for the Thomas Jefferson-designed rotunda at the University of Virginia, where she has been lecturing on politics and writing a new book, "Oath and Honor."
Let me ask you about that oath. If a person is a member of Congress and they have sworn an oath to defend the Constitution, can they defend the Constitution and also endorse Donald Trump?
CHENEY: No. It isn’t consistent.
DICKERSON: So they are breaking with their oath by saying they would like him to be the next president?
CHENEY: In my view, you know, fundamentally, there is a choice to be made. You can't be for Donald Trump and for the Constitution. You have to choose.
DICKERSON: It's a lot of people who are choosing Donald Trump.
CHENEY: Yeah. It is.
DICKERSON: In the aftermath of the January 6th, 2021 attack on the Capitol, Cheney was one of ten House Republicans who voted to impeach Donald Trump. Soon after she joined the Democratically led committee to investigate the attack.
CHENEY: Tonight I say this to my Republican colleagues who are defending the indefensible. There will come a day when Donald Trump is gone, but your dishonor will remain.
DICKERSON: Once the number three leader in the House Republican conference, Cheney was shunned by it, but she found an ally in then-Speaker of the house California Democrat Nancy Pelosi.
CHENEY: I don't know that I had ever spoken more than a few sentences to her before she called me and asked me to be on the committee. I learned later that her staff put together for her a list of the top ten worst things Liz Cheney has ever said about Nancy Pelosi and gave it to her, and she say apparently took one look at and said”why are you bothering me with things that don't matter”?
DICKERSON: Reporter: Would you take back some of the ten?
CHENEY: Oh, sure. We have all said things about each other we probably in hindsight wish we hadn't.
DICKERSON: Cheney same to Washington in 2016, along with Donald Trump. Didn't like him, she said, but she supported his policies on issues like abortion and gun control. She voted with him more than 90% of the time.
CHENEY: Certainly I think all of us in the Republican Party watched things unfold to some extent before 2020 and said, well, that's, you know, just Donald Trump. You don't have to take it seriously. I think what we saw that was different post-2020 election was the actual attempt to overturn the election and seize power.
DICKERSON: Cheney's book also details the groundwork laid by Trump's allies in the weeks leading up to January 6th. In the book you spend a fair amount of time on a previously relatively obscure Louisiana congressman.
CHENEY: This is Mike Johnson. You know, Mike and I were good friends. But what I learned was that in fact he was operating in a way that was dangerous.
DICKERSON: Why dangerous?
CHENEY: It was dangerous because what Mike was doing was taking steps that he knew to be wrong, doing things that he knew to have no basis in fact or law or the Constitution. Mike was willing, time and again, to ignore the rulings of the courts, to ignore what state and federal courts had done and said about the elections in these states in order to attempt to do Donald Trump's bidding.
DICKERSON: So he was asserting not only facts for which he had no evidence, but which the courts had already ruled had no merit?
CHENEY: Right. Exactly.
DICKERSON: We asked Speaker Mike Johnson for comment. His office tells "Sunday morning" Cheney's book does not present an accurate portrayal of those events and that he wishes her the best.
In that book, Cheney itemizes each turn with Johnson before January 6th. A lot of attention for a name she expected few of her readers to know, but she felt Johnson's sleight of hand was emblematic of Republicans who don't just go along with Trump's deceptions, but boost them. She had no idea she was writing about a future Speaker. The Speaker of the House is a collaborator to overthrow the last election?
CHENEY: Absolutely.
DICKERSON: What happens if Mike Johnson is the speaker on the 6th of January 2025?
CHENEY: He can't be. You know, we are facing a situation with respect to the 2024 election where it's an existential crisis and we have to ensure that we don't have a situation where an election that might be thrown into the House of Representatives is overseen by a Republican majority.
DICKERSON: So you would prefer a Democratic majority?
CHENEY: I believe very strongly in those principles and ideals that have defined the Republican Party, but the Republican Party of today has made a choice and they haven't chosen the Constitution. And so I do think it’s- it presents a threat if the Republicans are in the majority in January 2025.
DICKERSON: It's a threat Cheney hopes she can be clear enough about to break through the political numbness. You say Donald Trump, if he is re-elected, it will be the end of the Republic. What do you mean?
CHENEY: He’s told us what he will do. People who say, well, if he is elected it's not that dangerous because we have all of these checks and balances, don't fully understand the extent to which the Republicans in Congress today have been co-opted. One of the things that we see happening today is a sort of a sleepwalking into dictatorship in the United States.
DICKERSON: Donald Trump a fascist?
CHENEY: I think that he certainly is employing fascist techniques. I think that the tools that he is using are tools that we have seen used by authoritarians, fascists, tyrants around the world. You know, the things that he has said and done in some ways are so outrageous that we have become numb to them. What I believe is the cause of our time is that we not become numb, that we understand the warning signs, that we understand the danger and that we ignore partisan politics to stop him.
