This post is a knee jerk response to reports that House representatives are gearing up for a criminal investigation of Liz Cheney for her work on the January 6 Committee.
This blog aims to speak from an explicitly non-political perspective of America’s founding premises, stated in the Declaration’s second sentence. This viewpoint relegates partisan doctrines to an auxiliary role, interpretations of our national ends at best, not fundamental values as the various politicians like to claim. Our politics should serve to work out means – to pursue the Declaration’s national ends. Cheney herself has been a hard political advocate for a particular partisan approach to governing policy.
But Cheney has shown herself committed to the nation. The January 6 insurrection clearly needed to be investigated. A mob, including armed agitators, aimed to disrupt, by force, a Constitutional proceeding for the most crucial act of a democracy – ensuring democratic and orderly succession of power. Our nation has formally defined treason as aiding a wartime enemy, but by an ancient conception of the word, the Jan. 6 invasion of the Capitol was a treasonous act. Anyone who inspired, planned, encouraged, or participated in that act should have been punished for it, and that punishment should aim to deter anyone from ever contemplating any other insurrection.
The fact that Donald Trump declined to direct agitators to desist from such plans, encouraged the crowd as it gathered on that day, and evidently wanted the insurrection to succeed, made a full and searching investigation of his involvement necessary. Whether or not his actions constitute insurrectionary guilt should be established in the fullest possible light.
Cheney proceeded by this rationale, in concert with longtime political adversaries, and in the face of overt hostility. Notably, she also ran an uphill re-election campaign, as opposed to other Republicans on the committee who were quitting the political arena. In other words, Cheney acted with a singular focus on the question at hand, put her political career on the line rather than shrinking from it, and reached across our ever-deepening political fault line, for the sake of principle.
Notably, the Democrats whose campaign rhetoric called Trump a threat to democracy did not, as Peggy Noonan alluded, treat that alleged threat as a national emergency. They did not set aside their partisan agenda, did not court moderate Republicans, did not try to build a supra-partisan effort to protect democracy. They merely used the word as a punch line for their partisan agenda. The only Republican who figured in their campaign was Liz Cheney, again sticking her neck out for the sake of principle.
While politicians scramble to support, or find ways to impede, Donald Trump’s politics in his Presidency, all, pro or con, ought to recognize that their politics are about mere means to our national ends. Rhetorical excess is inevitable, but moralizing over policy issues has been the biggest spur to our division and bitterness. That said, a very few items on the menu of current discourse do stand above politics.
We hold that governments exist to secure the unalienable rights of all, taking legitimacy from the consent of the governed. We the People set the terms of that consent in our Constitution. Integrity in its commitment to rule by impartial law, not for the interest of any faction, doctrine, or person, is crucial to America’s national legitimacy. Liz Cheney put that first. Retributive measures against her undermines it. Nothing could damage America more.
Common Conviction 