Remember when Liz Cheney lost her primary in Wyoming by nearly 40 points and the press insisted that she would become more powerful than ever, with even more national power? As the story went, she was like Obi-Wan Kenobi. Strike her down, and you would live to regret it.
Well, that didn’t happen. Instead, Cheney has slipped into the background, which is exactly where she belongs as she finishes out the last few months of her final term in the House of Representatives. Likewise, the January 6th committee has become a non-entity outside of hysterical beltway-dwelling journalists and Never Trumpers, but I repeat myself.
In an attempt to re-up the hype, the January 6th committee recently voted to subpoena Donald Trump in a move to force him to testify. The smart set gasped, and Trump actually suggested he might appear.
Now, Cheney is warning Trump that he won’t be allowed to turn the committee into a “circus.”
Cheney told moderator Chuck Todd on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the committee would treat any deposition with the former president with “great seriousness.”
“We are going to proceed in terms of the questioning of the former president under oath,” Cheney, one of two Republicans on the panel, said. “It may take multiple days, and it will be done with a level of rigor and discipline and seriousness that it deserves.”
“He’s not going to turn this into a circus. This isn’t going to be first debate against [President] Biden and the circus and the food fight that became,” the lawmaker added.
If you can read that warning from Cheney and not burst out laughing, you get a cookie. I mean, I’m not going to provide the cookie, but go grab one from the pantry because you have far more self-control than I do.
I mean, come on. The January 6th committee already is a circus. It exists as an unprecedented, partisan political tool meant to spin narratives that benefit the Democratic Party. Nothing about how it operates is fair or reasonable. Instead, its members use heavily edited videos (and in some cases, manufactured “evidence”) and emotional testimonies to paint a picture that doesn’t resemble reality. And when one of their star witnesses turns out to be a liar, the committee doesn’t even attempt to drill down the truth.
Everything is built around “getting” Donald Trump. It doesn’t matter that after multiple hearings and months of hand-wringing, Cheney and her cohorts have provided zero evidence the former president had any part in what happened on January 6th. They are going to keep pushing until the bitter end, no matter how much credibility they blow. In short, there is nothing Trump could do that would make the January 6th committee more of a joke than it already is.
The former president should also laugh at the idea of going and giving a closed-door deposition. All Cheney, Schiff, and the rest would do is chop it up and selectively release bits of it, a favorite tactic they’ve used with past witnesses. Heck, Trump should not testify at all. There’s more than enough time to tie things up in court until Republicans are back in power in January, at which point Cheney will move to Virginia and the January 6th committee will cease to exist.