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It took four months longer than it should have, but Congressional Republicans have finally tossed out Liz Cheney from her role as chair of the House Republican Conference.

Representative Liz Cheney was removed Wednesday from her leadership position among House Republicans. She was ousted as conference chair in a voice vote by House GOP members shortly after their closed-door meeting came to order, and the meeting was adjourned within 20 minutes.

After the vote, Cheney told reporters that she “will do everything I can to make sure the former president never again gets anywhere near the Oval Office.” [CBS News]

Good riddance.

Despite the defenestration of Cheney at the hands of Donald Trump’s America First movement, some Republicans still don’t get it. With some, like Illinois Republican Adam Kinzinger, their support for Cheney is no surprise. But others should know better. Colorado Congressman Ken Buck ought to be leading the defense of America-first patriots from Liz Cheney’s defamation of them. Instead, he has been her most vocal supporter. Buck was the only Republican present as she gave a defiant speech on the House floor Tuesday night. And after she was tossed from her post on Wednesday morning, he spoke up to denounce his party for disempowering her.

“Liz Cheney was canceled today for speaking her mind and disagreeing with the narrative that President Trump was putting forward,” Buck said after Cheney was voted out.

Buck’s claim is only twenty words long yet manages to be wrong on several different levels. First off, Cheney was not “canceled.” She isn’t a pizzeria owner being targeted for political offenses entirely unrelated to her job. She isn’t being exiled from polite society or being charged with trumped-up hate crimes. She isn’t being treated as unfit for gainful employment. She’s a politician losing a leadership post because she lot the confidence of her party.

Calling Cheney’s deposition a “cancellation” is like saying a pro football quarterback is “canceled” if he gets benched after throwing four straight interceptions. Cheney isn’t doing what a Republican Party leader should do. She is out of step with the base and they don’t want her, so she shouldn’t be a party leader, period.

But Buck’s statement is preposterous in another way. Cheney isn’t being tossed for “disagreeing” with Trump about the election. She was failing America First conservatives long before the election was even held. And now for months, far beyond just “disagreeing” with Trump, she has collaborated in the blood libel of his supporters and the greater political movement President Trump represents.

In public statements again this week, former president Donald Trump has repeated his claims that the 2020 election was a fraud and was stolen. His message: I am still the rightful president, and President Biden is illegitimate. Trump repeats these words now with full knowledge that exactly this type of language provoked violence on Jan. 6. And, as the Justice Department and multiple federal judges have suggested, there is good reason to believe that Trump’s language can provoke violence again.[WaPo]

Cheney is doing far more than arguing that the 2020 election was in fact legitimate. She is claiming that President Trump provoked violence, when he did nothing of the sort.

Cheney goes even further though, by supporting the unprecedented manhunt for January 6 participants and the creation of a special “bipartisan” commission to “investigate” the matter:

For Republicans, the path forward is clear.

First, support the ongoing Justice Department criminal investigations of the Jan. 6 attack. Those investigations must be comprehensive and objective.

…

Second, we must support a parallel bipartisan review by a commission with subpoena power to seek and find facts; it will describe for all Americans what happened. This is critical to defeat the misinformation and nonsense circulating in the press and on social media. No currently serving member of Congress — with an eye to the upcoming election cycle — should participate. We should appoint former officials, members of the judiciary and other prominent Americans who can be objective, just as we did after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The commission should be focused on the Jan. 6 attacks. The Black Lives Matter and antifa violence of last summer was illegal and reprehensible, but it is a different problem with a different solution. [WaPo]

Whether it’s deliberate, or the product of imbecility, everything in Cheney’s statement solely serves to empower the left and its twisted narratives. She treats the January 6 incident, where the only death by violence was a cop shooting an unarmed protester, as equivalent to a terror attack that killed three thousand people. She treats the incident as worse than the mass looting of American cities by Antifa/BLM mobs (which was actively excused and even justified by the media and Democratic politicians) by deeming them unworthy of focus.

Revolver explained exactly what a “bipartisan” commission on January 6 would do back when an open letter from dozens of Deep State veterans called for one:

This dishonest and error-ridden letter isn’t a call for an “investigation.” It is a call for an anti-MAGA Patriot Act. It’s a demand for a new War on Terror, this time aimed at the American people. … These federal goons believe that the only way to fight a so-called “coordinated disinformation campaign” is with restrictions on free speech, social media bans and criminal prosecutions for “disinformation.”

The Deep State will want to fight the so-called “nontransparent funding of extremist networks” with new financial laws to end anonymous political donations and dox those providing support to causes unpopular inside the Beltway.

They will use the phantom threat of “white supremacists” to transform patriots of all backgrounds into nascent terrorists who must be purged from America’s institutions as an internal ideological threat. [Revolver]

Politicians and political parties exist to represent the values of their constituents. Republican constituents support President Trump, support his leadership of the party, and oppose efforts to defame them as white supremacists, insurrectionists, and terrorists.

Liz Cheney is allowed to believe whatever she wants. But if she wants to be a leader in the Republican Party, then she should stop voting to impeach Republican presidents based on left-wing narratives, and she should stop tarring the basic morals of the people who voted her into office.

Sadly, Ken Buck doesn’t seem to understand this. To him, Liz Cheney defaming rank and file Republicans, and justifying a 9/11 Commission-style “investigation” of them, is just a fair opinion that should be celebrated in the party. It’s a shame. Given how disappointing so many Republican lawmakers are, Buck has overall been pretty good. He supports a border wall. He backed President Trump’s planned withdrawal from Afghanistan. His Second Amendment record is superb. Unlike many Republicans, he realizes that Elise Stefanik is a less than ideal choice to replace Cheney. But sadly, at key points Buck is prone to appalling failures of judgment.

At the beginning of the coronavirus shutdowns, Buck insanely opposed even basic stimulus payments to the American people who were prohibited from working or supporting themselves. Given that Americans had their lives destroyed by government diktat rather than any personal choice of their own, opposing government payments to offset losses was borderline immoral. It was also bad politics, as Republican failure to pass a second stimulus in the summer or fall of 2020 is almost certainly to blame for their defeat in November.

It’s not that Buck is categorically opposed to bailouts of any kind. Besides his white knighting for Rep. Cheney, Buck has also attached himself to a bill meant to bail out failing media companies.

The [Journalism Competition and Preservation Act] was introduced and initially championed by a Democrat congressman, Rep. David Cicilline (D-RI), and was sold to Republicans like Buck as a means of taking on Big Tech. House Republican leadership including Kevin McCarthy and Jim Jordan have opposed the bill.

…

The bill allows for greater collusion between Big Tech and Big Media. It allows media organizations to form cartels that would otherwise be illegal under antitrust law, for the specific purpose of strengthening their hand in negotiations with the tech giants. This risks deepening the problem of collusion between mainstream media and Silicon Valley, in which the former pressures the latter to censor its competition.

…

Speaking at a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee in March, independent journalist and vocal critic of Silicon Valley censorship Glenn Greenwald warned that the JCPA would increase the power of Big Media and lead to more censorship by Big Tech companies.

“If you empower this industry without very clear and concrete safeguards… you could very well be essentially accelerating some of the worst industry trends, ensuring that, say, hedge funds that control the industry, or media giants that exert overwhelming power like the New York Times… can further entrench their power through this negotiating force that becomes an antitrust exemption,” said Greenwald. [Breitbart]

Big Tech right now is the greatest danger to free speech and the free press in America. But it’s not the most emphatic opponent of those rights. That title belongs to America’s elite regime media: The top newspapers and largest websites that demand the suppression of “misinformation,” cheer on social media bans, and consider any criticism of their own journalists “harassment.” Buck’s misguided bill would attempt to fight Big Tech censorship by empowering the only group in America that is even more pro-censorship.

As currently written, nothing in this bill would stop a CNN-WaPo-NBC cartel from negotiating deals with the tech companies that are to the detriment of truth-telling publications like Revolver News. It would let them stamp out competitors that might, for instance, expose the lie of Liz Cheney’s false slanders pertaining to the January 6 incident. It takes a demonic trend of the past four years — the fake news media’s collusion with Big Tech — and makes it law.

Ken Buck should be better than this. His district is about as safely Republican as it gets. Buck has won by at least 20 points in each of his four elections, and the district backed President Trump by 16 last year. The privileged holders of these seats have no excuse not to be rock solid on every issue. Buck is correct on most issues. So he should stop enabling the media outlets and the politicians who want his base of patriotic Americans silenced and suppressed.

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