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