Democrats Mourn Liz Cheney’s Primary Loss to Harriet Hageman

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Democrats appeared to mourn the projected loss of Never Trump Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) to the Donald Trump-backed candidate Harriet Hageman.

The Cook Political Report and Decision Desk HQ found that Hageman will unseat Cheney in the battle for Wyoming’s at-large congressional district.

Many Democrats did not take the news well.

Jon Cooper, a former finance chair for the Draft Biden 2016 campaign, wrote, “The GOP is going to pay at the polls for what they’ve done to Liz Cheney:”

Robert Reich, a former secretary of labor under then-President Bill Clinton, wrote an op-ed for the Guardian in praise of Cheney. He wrote:

Six days after the 6 January 2021 attack on the Capitol – when no other Republican in the House or Senate was willing to rebuke Trump – Cheney charged on the House floor that “the president of the United States summoned this mob, assembled the mob, and lit the flame of this attack. Everything that followed was his doing.”

The next day, Cheney joined nine other House Republicans and 222 Democrats in voting to impeach Trump.

The role Cheney has played raises a larger question about the meaning of representative democracy. Is it the responsibility of elected officials to represent the views of their constituents or their own principles?

The question isn’t limited to Republicans. As the midterms draw closer, some Democratic operatives and pundits argue that Biden and the Democrats must move to the “center” to win.

But where is the center? Halfway between democracy and fascism? And if Democrats must go there to win, what’s the point of winning?

George Conway, a columnist for the Washington Post, wrote, “Whatever happens, @Liz_Cheney has won the general election for dignity, a race in which virtually none of her GOP colleagues could even compete.”

However, not all Democrats regret Cheney’s loss to Hageman.

Former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), whose noninterventionist foreign policy views sharply contrasted with Cheney’s neoconservative foreign policy vision, wrote. “It appears that Liz Cheney, one of the GOP’s chief warmongers, is about to lose. This is good news for every American regardless of party.”

Sean Moran is a congressional reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.

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