US Representative Liz Cheney vowed on Sunday to oppose Republican candidates who support former US President Donald Trump’s lies about a stolen 2020 election and declared Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley “unfit” for office after they voted to impeach of the presidential results. Cheney, who is Trump’s leading critic and vice chairman of the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol by his supporters, told ABC’s “This Week” that a broad boycott movement could undermine the US constitutional order. if not selected. The daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney has already said she will spend the next two years trying to prevent Trump from returning to the White House in 2024, possibly with her own presidential bid. He declined to tell ABC whether he will run inside or outside the Republican Party if he decides to run for president. “I’m going to be very focused on working to make sure that we do everything we can to not elect election deniers,” Cheney said in a taped interview last week, days after she lost the Republican primary to a challenger supported by Trump. “We have election naysayers who have been nominated for really important positions across the country. And I’m going to work against those people. I’m going to work to support their opponents.” Cheney did not say which Republican candidates she would oppose, but acknowledged that they would include some of her Republican colleagues in the US House of Representatives. Republicans are favored to take control of the House, but could face a bigger challenge by winning the Senate majority in the Nov. 8 midterm elections, which will determine the balance of power in Congress for the next two years. As one of two Republicans on the Jan. 6 House committee, Cheney was able to draw a direct connection between the deadly melee and Trump’s repeated false claims that he won the 2020 election over President Joe Biden. “Donald Trump is certainly the focus of the threat,” Cheney said. “What he has created is a movement on some level that is meta-truth.” The January 6 attack forced Congress to temporarily suspend its certification of Trump’s defeat of Biden, in which Hawley, Cruz and other Republican members of Congress voted against certifying the election results. Cheney said the actions of Hawley, Cruz and other Republican lawmakers “fundamentally threatened the constitutional order and structure” and concluded that “both have been rendered unfit for future office.” A spokesman for Cruz responded with a statement saying the senator does not want or need Cheney’s endorsement. Hawley’s office was not immediately available for comment. Neither Cruz nor Hawley is running for re-election in November. He also criticized Florida Gov. Ron DeSandis for campaigning on behalf of election naysayers, including Republican gubernatorial candidates Kari Lake of Arizona and Doug Mastriano of Pennsylvania. “That’s something that I think people should give real pause about. You know, you either fundamentally believe and you’re going to support our constitutional structure, or you don’t,” Cheney said. Like Trump himself, DeSantis has flirted with voters about the possibility of his own presidential bid in 2024 as he seeks re-election in Florida this year. The DeSantis campaign was not immediately available for comment. Cheney’s re-election in Wyoming last week was widely seen as a victory for Trump’s revenge against House Republicans who voted to impeach him after the Jan. 6 uprising. He told ABC he heard from Biden afterward: “We had a very good conversation, a conversation about the importance of putting country before partisanship.” (Reporting by David Morgan Editing by Mary Milliken and Lisa Shumaker)
