The lawless Liz Cheney

Congresswoman Liz Cheney had a supposedly shining moment this week as she sat on the January 6 committee to lecture the Capitol attackers and anyone in league with former President Donald Trump about the importance of the rule of law.

Cheney has long said the committee was about “fidelity” to the Constitution.

Seriously? Liz Cheney? Dick’s neocon daughter?

People are buying this? I don’t even know where to start.

In 2011, when libertarian-leaning Republican Justin Amash and many in the Tea Party movement insisted that President Barack Obama did not have the constitutional authority to bomb Libya, Cheney, Senator John McCain and other establishment politicians said to hell with the Constitution. When Obama finally did bomb Libya, Republican Senator Rand Paul noted that the president had violated the War Powers Act.

Cheneys: So?

Cheney’s addiction to war is bipartisan. When Trump ordered a strike on Syria in 2018, that was also unconstitutional. Yet Cheney praised the military action. She didn’t seem worried about the rule of law back then.

The US hasn’t waged an actual constitutional war, meaning one that Congress has declared, since World War II. In that time, someone named Cheney, whether Liz or her pops, has been there to root for plenty of these illegal conflicts and to pray they become endless.

Someone in Congress also almost always points out that these wars are outside the bounds of America’s governing charter. Yet the Cheneys don’t care.

Then there’s the torture. The Cheneys don’t necessarily use that word, of course, but they’ve defended practices that in any context would be considered torture.

Like waterboarding, which the Reagan administration definitely considered torture. Torture is also illegal, if the rule of law is of any concern.

It’s not for Liz Cheney. Anytime this becomes an issue, expect to find Cheney firmly in the pro-torture camp.

Hell, torture might as well be their family business — the law be damned.

There’s also Cheney’s disregard for constitutional privacy rights and the Fourth Amendment.

To say Cheneys love the Patriot Act would be an understatement, yet a federal court ruled in 2004 that the law violated the Constitution.

On the mass surveillance conducted by the government against, well, everyone, revealed to the world by Edward Snowden in 2013, Liz is definitely on the side of the government snoops and firmly against the whistleblower whom she considers a traitor. Never mind that a federal judge ruled that the mass surveillance Snowden revealed was illegal.

Cheney didn’t crow about the rule of law after that court decision in 2020.

Indeed, when it comes to the war on terror and the George W. Bush-era brand that she and her father have spent their lives defending — from drone strikes to black sites to Gitmo — Cheneys can regularly be found outside the bounds of the law as defined by our courts and public conversations about the legality and morality of such practices.

One could argue that Cheney’s support for these unlawful acts is as much as, or even more of, a threat to American democracy than what took place on January 6, 2021.

Maintaining the rule of law is vital to peace and order in America’s constitutional republic. One can’t help but notice that it’s habitual outlaw Liz Cheney who’s being given credit for saying so.