House Republicans voted by a wide margin on Wednesday to allow Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney to stay on as chair of the GOP conference after an hour-long meeting in which members voiced grievances over her vote to oust former President Trump last month. put. Only 61 Republicans voted to remove Cheney from her post, while 145 voted for her to remain by secret ballot.
The vote came after Cheney told her Republican colleagues she would not apologize for her decision, according to a source familiar with the rally. She later praised the result as a “great voice”.
“We will not be in a situation where people can choose every member of the leadership,” she said after the meeting. “It was a very resounding acknowledgment that we have to move forward together and then we have to move forward in a way that helps us defeat the really dangerous and negative policies of the Democrats.”
She entered the meeting on Wednesday with the support of both House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Republican Whip Steve Scalise, the top two GOP leaders in the House.
“People can have disagreements. That’s what we have a discussion about. Liz has the right to vote her conscience,” McCarthy told reporters during a break in the meeting.
But both top leaders admitted and even encouraged members to question Cheney’s decision leading up to the GOP meeting. In an interview last month, McCarthy said he was “concerned” that she had not announced in advance her vote or her plan to speak out against the former president.
After the vote, both men said their conference was in a good place.
“We just got a thunderous shot in the arm that we have a team,” McCarthy said. Scalise said the conference was “much stronger” because anyone could voice their grievances.
Republican representatives Matt Rosendale of Montana and Andy Biggs of Arizona, who were among the members most frustrated by Cheney, spearheaded efforts to remove her from her leadership position. The vote to remove her ultimately fell far behind the more than 115 members anti-Cheney forces claimed would vote against her.
The main irritant to the Republicans who supported the removal effort was Cheney’s decision to make her position known the day before the vote, a source familiar with attempts to remove Cheney from her leadership position told CBS News. During the debate the next day, House Democrats quoted her words on the floor.
Cheney was the most high-profile and highest rank of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach the former president. After making the announcement, Rosendale called for her to resign, saying that she “had not consulted the Conference, was not following the spirit of the Republican Conference rules and was ignoring the preferences of Republican voters.”
The mood also caused her problems at home. She has drawn three primary challengers for her seat in the House, including Wyoming State Senator Anthony Bouchard, who said her vote for impeachment “shows she has no contact with Wyoming.” Her colleague, Florida Republican Matt Gaetz, traveled to her home state to rally against her, calling her a “Beltway bureaucrat turned fake cowgirl” and shouting her impeachment vote and support for US military involvement abroad.
Alan He, Zak Hudak and Jack Turman contributed to this story.