Jackson, WY – Last night, Wyoming Congresswoman Liz Cheney (R-WY) participated in a forum sponsored by Issue One that focused on the U.S. Constitution and America’s election process. Cheney received a standing ovation from the Wyoming audience when the event began and spoke at length throughout the event about how no citizen in a Republic can be a bystander, how we must remember that we are not enemies, and how elected officials must always uphold the Constitution and cannot pick and choose when to follow it.
The whole event can be seen here. Video and a transcript of Rep. Cheney’s opening remarks are included directly below, and there’s also a clip following that of an answer she gave about Congress’s role in the certification of the Electoral College and potential election reforms she supports like increasing voter ID, updating voter rolls, and ending ballot harvesting:
REP. LIZ CHENEY: Well, thank you so much, Paul, wonderful to be with you all. Wonderful to be here with Nick and to have the chance to talk about a hugely important issue. I think in many ways, Wyoming certainly leads the country. And in one in particular that Nick mentioned, we’ve got no issues with gerrymandering in our House of Representatives race. So, we’re good to go. But it’s really wonderful to be here. And, you know, when I look at the audience, when I see the young people who are here, and I think about what our democracy is and what our democracy means. I could remember being in school and people saying to me, there are things you hear a lot, you hear, you know, “You can make a difference.” You hear people talking about our democracy and what it means. But I can tell you with absolute confidence that our democracy is fragile, and that the institutions that make up our democracy — so, you know, our executive branch, our legislative branch, our courts. Those institutions don’t defend themselves. People have to do that. And that starts with the people, the men and women in uniform, who, generation after generation, have sacrificed, many made the ultimate sacrifice for our freedom. And it runs through every citizen. I think one thing that we must always remember, we live in a Republic. And in a Republic, no citizen can be a bystander. And that means that in this Republic, you have to stand up for what you believe in. You have to learn through organizations like We The People, which is one of my very, most favorite student groups anywhere. And I look forward to the chance to being able to welcome people — welcome you guys back to Washington when our Capitol is fully open again. But if you think about this moment that we’re all living through, and you think back into history. And if you go back, and you think about the extent to which most people, in most places on Earth, in most time periods, did not have the opportunity to decide who would lead them, did not have the opportunity to have a voice in what their laws were. And we do. We are the greatest constitutional Republic that has ever existed, and that imposes a real duty on every one of us. When you think about — people often will say as well things like, “Well, you know, we have inherited this democracy, and we have to pass it to our children.” And that is certainly true. But I think it’s really important to stop and think about what that means — for each of us what that means. What that means is we have a duty. People have fought and they have died for this constitutional Republic. And we cannot just throw it away because our politics don’t match the outcome of an election. We must not do that.
And when you think about what it means to be an elected official, I would ask you to think about — whether you are a Democrat or a Republican — to think about how important it is that the people we elect have to be serious people. They have to be worthy of the responsibility and the obligation of governing in this Republic, and they have to be up to the tasks and the challenges we face. Both Pauls and Nick talked about some of those challenges. They talked about what’s happening in Ukraine. You can see what’s happening with respect to the rise of China. You can see what’s happening with Iran and North Korea, can see what we’re dealing with here at home with inflation and economic challenges and supply chain issues and COVID. We’re facing really serious, grave issues. And those issues require serious people. So, when you’re casting your vote, when you’re thinking about who to vote for, one of the things that’s most important for us to do is to incentivize serious people. There are a lot of people, too many people, in Congress today on both sides of the aisle who are not serious, who don’t do their homework, and who treat politics like it’s a game.
I had the great honor and privilege of growing up being raised by Dick and Lynne Cheney, two people who love American history, who love this nation, and who taught Mary and me how important it is to revere our history and to revere who we are as a country. I also have had the privilege of working around the world, working in countries that aren’t democracies. And I’ve watched — I spent a number of years working in Eastern Europe in 1989, and ’90 and ’91, and then working in Moscow and in Kiev. And I have seen — I’ve worked in Africa and the Middle East; I’ve seen countries where people don’t have a voice. I’ve spent time working in places where people worry about what they might say in a restaurant with friends because they don’t know who’s listening, where people are imprisoned because of what they believe. And I also think a lot about the history of our state and about the history of the people who came here first. Many of us have relatives — I have two of my great, great grandmothers who walked across the Mormon Trail, and I mean walked. And a great grandfather and his brother who first settled here in 1917 in Lost Cabin, and you think about what they were doing. You know, my great, great grandmothers came West in search of religious freedom. They came West because they couldn’t worship the way they wanted to worship, the way that they knew they had to. My great grandfather and his brother came here looking for economic freedom and economic opportunity. And that promise of who we are in Wyoming, that promise of the West, the promise of who we are as Americans, is an incredible and unbelievable blessing. And as you think about the challenges that we’re facing in this country right now, we must be able to have debates and discussions about substance and about issues where we can disagree, but where we remember we are not enemies. We’re not enemies. And we must be able to have those debates and have those discussions based on a foundation of our Constitution.
Nick talked about the Twelfth Amendment. And the Twelfth Amendment talks about the electoral count, and how — the Electoral College — and how we count votes. And it’s very clear, it doesn’t say that the vice president can decide which electors to count, it doesn’t say that Congress can decide which electors to count. It’s very clear about our duties and our obligations. And as an elected official, as somebody who’s sworn an oath to the Constitution, I don’t get to pick and choose, and I don’t want to pick and choose. If I won’t defend the Twelfth Amendment, if I won’t defend that the plain meaning in the text of the Twelfth Amendment, then how can I defend the First Amendment? And how can I defend the Second Amendment? The Constitution is our shield. And when you think about what it means, and the responsibility that we all have, I think it’s really important for us to recognize that we don’t get to have the debates about substance and about policy if we abandon the Constitution. So, we have the opportunity tonight. And I think very much that this gathering of people who have different political views and persuasions can be a template for our state, and it can be a template for our country. As we begin to heal, as we begin to deal with the challenges we have to deal with, and as we remember what matters. And what matters is that we’re all Americans, we live in the greatest nation that has ever existed on the face of the Earth. And what we do as Americans matters to the whole world. The whole world is watching to see whether or not our constitutional Republic can thrive. And we have to make sure it does, and I’m committed to doing that. So, thank you so much.
PAUL HANSEN: So, Nick put the solution to the problem into three buckets, and I wonder if you could respond: ease of voting, mail-in early voting, automatic voter registrations, security of votes cast, voter ID, cybersecurity, paper trails, protecting election workers, and preventing subversion, Electoral Count Act reforms, and trying to keep the election process from becoming partisan.
REP. CHENEY: Yeah, I don’t want to give, sort of, a blanket approval to every one of those. But I think that most of those make a lot of sense. And, you know, I think one thing that is really important that has to, sort of, provide the foundation for any election reform is I don’t want the federal government involved in our elections in a way that is extra-constitutional. And you know, there are too often now — I go back to January 6th, before the attack, and to January 4th and 5th when we were having all of these debates in the Republican Conference about objecting to the electoral votes. And I kept coming back to the idea that we don’t want Congress picking our president. It’s not constitutional. And if I were to say, “I think Congress can object to the electoral votes from California,” then what’s to protect Wyoming if somebody, a Democrat from California decides, “You know what, I don’t like the way Wyoming cast their three electoral votes, I think Congress ought to change that.” That’s not how our system works. And I think as we’re looking at changes, voter ID is really important. I think making sure that we have absentee ballots opened and counted. You know, we need to have an end to the election and nice to have the end be on Election Day. I think that we also ought to work to clean and clear out voter rolls. You know, that is something that is fundamentally important, but becomes a political hot potato. I also think that ballot harvesting is a real problem. And ballot harvesting goes on where, you know, people go around and collect a bunch of ballots and take them all to a single location to vote and that opens up possibilities for fraud. So, I think we need to empower our states to make sure that they’re doing everything they can to continue to improve the integrity of our elections, and that ought to be nonpartisan.
Original source can be found here.
