By Mike Lillis - 10/16/24

Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) is taking her anti-Trump crusade to the congressional battlefield, endorsing Democrats in a pair of contested House races in a sign that she sees the lower chamber as a potential check on former President Trump if he wins a second term in the White House.

On Tuesday, Cheney endorsed John Avlon, a former CNN commentator who’s challenging GOP Rep. Nick LaLota (R-N.Y.) on Long Island. And on Wednesday, she threw her weight behind Rep. Susan Wild, a four-term Democrat who’s in a tight race for reelection in Pennsylvania’s Lehigh Valley. More endorsements may be forthcoming.

Both districts rank among the most competitive seats in the country, and both parties are scrambling for any advantage as they battle for control of the House next year — a razor-tight contest that remains too close to call in the last three weeks before Election Day.

“While we may not agree on everything, I know that [Wild] holds a deep respect for the integrity of our democracy,” Cheney said in a statement endorsing the Pennsylvania Democrat. “We need thoughtful and serious people in Congress who will uphold the rule of law.”

Cheney has made clear that she doesn’t think House Republicans fit that bill.

As far back as January of 2023, she warned that Republicans would pose “a threat” to the country if GOP leaders retain control of the House in 2025. And on Sunday, she went after Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.), who had crafted the legal rationale for challenging Trump’s election defeat in 2020, portraying him as a Trump sycophant and voicing doubts that he would certify the results if Trump loses in November.

“He knew — and he knew with specificity — that the claims of fraud that Donald Trump was making and that he was repeating, he knew those to be false,” Cheney said on NBC News’s “Meet the Press” program. “We had very clear and specific conversations about that.”

Johnson has disputed the accusations, saying he would “absolutely” fulfill his constitutional duty of formalizing the election results — if the contest “is free and fair and legal.”

Cheney has already jumped into the presidential race, announcing in September that she will vote for Vice President Harris in a bid to keep Trump from a second term. And her foray into House contests has precedent: In late 2022, Cheney endorsed a pair of House Democrats with national security backgrounds, Reps. Elissa Slotkin (Mich.) and Abigail Spanberger (Va.), both of whom won tight reelection races that year.

Still, Cheney is no Democrat. The daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, she served for three terms in the House beginning in 2017, siding with Trump on virtually every major policy fight while defending the former president through his first impeachment in 2019. But that all changed after Jan. 6, 2021, when a mob of Trump supporters stormed into the U.S. Capitol in a failed effort to overturn his election defeat two months earlier.

In the aftermath of the rampage, Cheney — who was then serving as chair of the House GOP conference — broke sharply from other Republican leaders by placing the blame squarely on Trump and warning that he poses an outsized threat to America’s democratic traditions. Her vocal condemnations infuriated many of her House GOP colleagues, and the backlash cut short her career on Capitol Hill.

In May of 2021, Republicans removed Cheney from leadership and replaced her with a Trump loyalist in Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.). Cheney subsequently served on the select committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack, concluding that Trump was the driving force behind it.

In August of 2022, as that probe was wrapping up, Cheney lost her GOP primary to another Trump supporter in Harriet Hageman.

The impact of Cheney’s endorsements remains unclear. While she represents a conservative family dynasty, one that once carried great weight in Republican circles, that influence has waned significantly since Trump entered the political scene and built an enormous base of support that commands control of the party and tolerates little dissent.

Still, pariah status hasn’t discouraged Cheney, who insists there’s room in politics for Republican anti-Trumpers like herself — even if it means creating a separate party.