Cheney is in the Number Three leadership position in the House GOP Caucus. Her vote to impeach a president of her own party is unprecedented by any measure but particularly when the grounds were so obviously contrived and wrong. The challenge to Kevin McCarthy is very much an in-your-face one. It signals to the GOP caucus that if McCarthy can’t hold his own leadership team together on a vote of this magnitude that the GOP caucus is now a gathering of free agents who can do whatever the hell they want to do.
This is just one of the acts that Cheney has taken to raise her own national profile at the expense of McCarthy and Scalise and her colleagues. Shortly before the vote to certify the Electoral College votes, a vote on which 120 of her colleagues decided to challenge the votes of several states with “peculiar” election results, she circulated a lengthy letter informing anyone who cared to read it that such a vote is un-Constitutional (SPOILER ALERT: it isn’t). It wasn’t
The Atlantic
The most dangerous thing that happened Wednesday occurred after the mob dispersed.
January 13, 2021
Anna Moneymaker / The New York Times / Redux
January 6, 2021, will surely live in infamy the day the United States Capitol was stormed by a mob, forcing legislators to evacuate in a rush and leaving five dead, including a police officer.
The most dangerous part of that day for the country as a whole, however, was not what happened when the insurrectionists fought their way into the Capitol in the afternoon, but what happened just a few hours later on the floor. After all that mayhem, the legislators were escorted back to the chamber under heavily armed escort, and a stunning 139 representatives 66 percent of the House GOP caucus along with eight GOP senators, promptly voted to overturn the election, just as the mob and the president had demanded.