Liz Cheney Failed the Only Republican Purity Test That Matters

[babylonsister]

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2021/05/elise-stefanik-trumps-liz-cheney.html

Liz Cheney Failed the Only Republican Purity Test That Matters
Elise Stefanik’s power grab proves that if you support Trump’s worst behavior, nothing else counts.
By Jim Newell
May 05, 20215:04 PM

snip//

By any of the measures the Freedom Caucus cared about before 2017, Stefanik’s leadership bid would be a nonstarter. She has a lifetime score of 48 percent with Heritage Action, the conservative pressure group, compared with the average House Republican’s score of 85 percent; Cheney’s score, meanwhile, is 80 percent. Stefanik voted, most notably, against the Trump tax cut package in 2017, and she has called for a repeal of that law’s cap on the state and local tax deduction. That’s something that plenty of Democrats, too, want to repeal, and because such a restoration would primarily benefit the wealthy, Republicans are planning to hit them hard on it. One might think that Stefanik’s entry into leadership, then, would complicate her ability to carry out that particular message.

Along with her generally shaky conservative credentials, Stefanik was not a notable supporter of Trump’s own policy positions. Throughout the Trump administration, she regularly broke from Trump, while Cheney stayed more or less in lockstep with the president. Stefanik voted to block Trump from breaking from the Paris climate accord, to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank (something conservatives used to get extremely mad about, all of a few years ago), to provide disaster aid for Puerto Rico, and to provide additional money for the Postal Service. She voted for the Equality Act (in 2019, at least). Just this year she voted for the Farm Workforce Modernization Act, which would offer a path to legal status for undocumented agricultural workers and has been derided by the usual suspects as “amnesty.”

The vote that really stands out, though, in this vibe-based discussion of how “Trumpy” a member is, was one she took in 2019. When Trump used an emergency declaration to repurpose otherwise-appropriated money to build his border wall, Stefanik was one of 13 House Republicans who voted to repeal the emergency. Cheney was not.

What does this say about the path to leadership now? You don’t have to be consistently conservative on policy, as Stefanik breaks from the conference consensus more often than Cheney does. Nor does it even mean being there on core motivating issues behind “Trumpism” like the wall and reduced immigration. What the path requires, now, is purely loyalty to Trump himself: at a minimum, to keep your mouth shut about Trump’s worst behavior and—even better—to defend it. That’s where the base energy is to make you a star, and that’s how to get Trump’s support. Stefanik may be off-message on a host of issues that used to matter, but she’s on-message on the only thing that still counts: She’s willing to lie for Trump.

[keithbvadu2]

1. Loyalty to the Trump cult above our country.

Loyalty to the Trump cult above our country.

[FakeNoose]

3. They have no reason to fly the American flag

... they've already shown how little loyalty they really have.

[WA-03 Democrat]

2. Trump is transactional

So is Stefanik. If her voting not with trump is that high how does that make her more loyal? Oh, who cares. May they pick each other to pieces. Republicans in Disarray!

[Blue Owl]

4. (*snicker*) "Purity" (*snicker*)

Whatever, GQP...

[crickets]

5. Elise Stefanik was chosen as a replacement for Cheney due to her sex,

not her political acumen. It will be interesting to see how long she lasts if this goes through without a hitch.