I wrote a column on it with something for nearly everyone to dislike. Contrary to many of her new foes, I think her willingness to lose political power for the sake of something she believes — and I believe that she is telling us exactly what she really thinks, rather than, say, making up a story to cover her anger at Trump’s foreign-policy instincts — is admirable. But I’m also not convinced by her positive case for Harris, partly because she has made so little effort to present one.
Her argument is that while she disagrees with Harris about many policies, Trump is a threat to the Constitution. As I discuss in the column, she stacks the deck by ignoring how Harris threatens the Constitution.
I would also add that not every policy issue should count as a mere policy issue. When she was in Congress, Cheney co-sponsored legislation saying that “the Congress hereby declares that the right to life guaranteed by the Constitution is vested in each human being,” including “each and every member of the species homo sapiens at all stages of life, including the moment of fertilization, cloning, or other moment at which an individual member of the human species comes into being.”
Does Cheney still believe that? If so, how does she square it with support for a candidate who wants to bring back Roe, encode it in federal law, and expand taxpayer support for abortion? So far, at least, she has not offered any thoughts about these matters in public. Nor has her father, Dick Cheney, who in addition to being a former vice president and Harris endorser is a past keynote speaker for the National Right to Life Committee.
Update (10/4/24): After I posted a link to this post on X/Twitter, it started a debate of sorts that led me to look up something Cheney said in September 2020:
[Donald Trump] has named judges that believe in the Constitution, that believe in the adherence to the Constitution, that know that judges are supposed to interpret the law and not make law. . . .
The more that the Democrats act as though they are willing to burn the whole place down, that they do not believe in the Constitution, the more threats that they make about court packing or trying to somehow abolish the Electoral College, the more the American people are just sick of it.
At that time, she believed Democrats and Democratic judicial appointees do not believe in or seek to adhere to the Constitution. If she no longer holds that view, I’d be interested to know why.