(CNN) – After months of publicly denying the lie that former President Donald Trump won the 2020 presidential election, Representative Liz Cheney is expected to lose her Republican lead in the U.S. House of Representatives on Wednesday.
House Republicans are likely to replace him with New York MP Ellis Stephanie, who has a more conservative voting record than Cheney, but has become one of Trump’s leading supporters. Cheney defended himself in a speech Tuesday night.
“We have to tell the truth,” Liz Cheney said. Our election was not stolen. And America has not failed.
Cheney backed up his earlier comments and conservative testimony at his conference amid criticism from Trump allies for refusing to accept the election result.
“I am a conservative Republican, and the most conservative of conservative policies is the fear of the rule of law,” he said. Elections are over. That is the rule of law. That is our constitutional process. Those who refuse to accept the judgments of our courts are fighting with the Constitution.
Despite the feud with Trump, House Republicans voted in early February to keep Liz Cheney as the No. 3 Republican in the House.
But a few weeks later, his resignation from Trump was in stark contrast to House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, who traveled to Trump’s Mar-e-Lago campus in January after claiming that Trump was responsible for the attack on Capitol and supporting Cheney. Leading referendum in February.
When asked by a reporter if Trump should speak at the Conservative Political Action Conference, McCarthy said “yes,” while Liz Cheney said, “I do not think I should play a role in the future of the party or the country.”
McCarthy then ended his appearance at press events with Cheney, raising questions about the election and refraining from his attacks.
Cheney’s comments last week appeared to be McCarthy’s last straw.
After Trump tried to rename his defeat “as.”The big lie! “Anyone who claims that they are spreading a big lie will overthrow the rule of law and poison our democratic system,” said Wyoming Republican 2020 election “not stolen.”
Other members of the House Republican leadership, including men, Trump, McCarthy, Steve Scholes, who was the most Republican in the House, and Stephanie, who worked to elect more Republican women in Congress, quickly agreed.
McCarthy told Fox News last weekend, “Everyone at the helm is working with the joy of the conference.” We want unity to move forward.
When asked on Tuesday if Liz Cheney rejected Trump too much, Scholis argued that his comments were not specifically about Cheney’s views on the former president, but on how his views were diverted from the broader Republican message.
“It’s not about right or wrong, it’s about focusing on our conference and the withdrawal of the agenda that drives the Biden administration,” Scholis said Tuesday.
Stephanie’s endorsement of Trump has risen with his upstate New York district, which backed Barack Obama in 2012 but elected Trump in 2016 and 2020. In 2016, a woman in Congress supported Trump as the party’s presidential candidate, but from time to time criticized him and did not want to say his name when asked who he would support.
Early in Trump’s presidency, he aligned himself with then-Speaker Paul Ryan and focused on his work on the Intelligence and Armed Services Committees. He also broke with Trump on some key priorities, including the decision to exclude the United States from the Paris climate deal and the 2017 Republican tax bill.
But when the House Democrats first tried to impeach Trump in 2019, Stephanie emerged as one of the president’s most outspoken advocates. In this process he received praise from Trump; The president called her “a new Republican star.”
In January, Stofanik opposed the certification of Joe Biden’s election and backed a lawsuit in Texas that sought to overturn election results in states where Trump had failed. The Supreme Court dismissed the case, saying Texas could not dismiss the results in other states.
Stephanie continued to question Biden’s success, saying he fully “fully” supported the controversial Republican-led audit in Arizona last week, where Biden won by a narrow margin.
There is no evidence of widespread electoral fraud in the 2020 election.
But some House Republicans who backed Cheyenne in February continued to reject Trump’s misrepresentations, claiming he had broken the party’s message as he sought to win the House of Representatives in 2022.
CNN’s Annie Grayer, Manu Raju, Lauren Fox and Jeremy Herb contributed. Report.
