Liz Cheney, a former Republican congresswoman and longtime opponent of abortion rights, condemned Republican-imposed bans on the procedure and urged conservatives on Monday to back Kamala Harris for president.
Cheney spoke at the first of three joint events with Harris in the suburbs of three swing states, aimed at selling moderate Republican voters away from party candidate Donald Trump. She has become the Democrat’s most prominent conservative surrogate and is rumored to be in line for a seat in a possible Harris Cabinet.
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At the first event in the Philadelphia suburb of Malvern, against a blue background that said “a new way forward” and a red one that said “country over party,” Cheney suggested that Republican-led states have gone too far in restricting of abortion since the Supreme Court ruling. The 2022 Dobbs decision ended it as a constitutional right.
“I think there are many of us across the country who have been pro-life, but who have seen what’s been happening in our states since the Dobbs decision and have seen state legislatures put in place laws that lead to women not receiving care. they need,” said Cheney, a former Wyoming congressman and daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney.
“I don’t think this is an issue that we’re seeing falling apart across party lines, but I think we’re seeing people coming together to say, what has happened to women, when women are faced with situations where they don’t get the care they need? , where in places like Texas, for example, the attorney general is talking about suing, suing to get access to women’s medical records… that’s not sustainable for us as a country and it has to change.”
Harris nodded repeatedly and applauded in response. The audience also clapped heartily.
It was a high-profile effort to build a consent structure for conservatives to support Harris, who has made reproductive freedom a centerpiece of her campaign and has pledged to restore Roe v Wade’s protections if Congress authorizes it. Cheney, on the other hand, has an A rating from Susan B Anthony Pro-Life America, a group that rates members of Congress based on their anti-abortion credentials.
Monday’s three events in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin were held in counties won by Nikki Haley in the Republican presidential primaries. Haley, a former governor of South Carolina and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, had tried to neutralize abortion as an election issue by supporting state autonomy and rejecting calls for a national ban.
Cheney has spoken out against Trump since the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol and served as vice chairman of a congressional committee that investigated the attack. Her recent endorsement of Harris fueled speculation that she could play a role in a future Harris administration.
Earlier this month, while appearing on the popular daytime talk show The View, Harris said she would differentiate herself from Joe Biden by including a Republican in her Cabinet. Radio host Howard Stern asked her if that could be Cheney, but avoided a direct answer. Cheney’s appointment would carry significant political risks, given her aggressive foreign policy and her father’s role in instigating the war in Iraq.
Trump has repeatedly tried to portray Harris, who is from deep-blue California, as a radical liberal, but she struck a moderate tone during her appearance with Cheney, who lost her House seat after co-chairing a congressional committee that investigated after the January 6 attack. .
She pledged to “invite good ideas wherever they come from” and “cut red tape,” and said “there should be a healthy two-party system” in the country. “We need to be able to have good, intense debates on issues that are based on facts,” she said.
“To suggest!” Cheney responded.
“Let’s start there!” Harris said as the audience clapped. “Can you believe this is an applause line?”
Voters in Chester County, which includes Malvern, narrowly voted for Republican Mitt Romney in 2012, but the county was won by Hillary Clinton by nine percentage points in 2016 and by Biden by 17 points in 2020.
The discussion was moderated by Sarah Longwell, who leads the group Republican Voters Against Trump, and lasted 40 minutes, including two questions from the audience.
Harris said Trump has “used the power of the presidency to humiliate and divide us” and that “people are exhausted by that.” The vice president added: “People all over the world are watching. And sometimes I worry a little about whether we as Americans really understand how important we are to the world.”
Cheney praised Harris, saying, “I’m a conservative. I know that fidelity to the Constitution is the most conservative of all conservative principles. You have to choose in this race between someone who has been faithful to the Constitution, who will be faithful, and Donald Trump.”
Cheney said she was concerned about allowing a “completely erratic, completely unstable” Trump to run foreign policy. “Our opponents know they can play Donald Trump,” she said. “And we cannot afford that risk.”
But some observers questioned the wisdom of campaigning with Cheney in Michigan, which has the highest concentration of Arab Americans in the country, given her aggressive foreign policy and her father’s role in fomenting the war in Iraq. Many such voters are now wavering or abstaining because of the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the Gaza crisis.
Trump spoke out on Monday, writing on his Truth Social platform: “Arab voters are very angry that Comrade Kamala Harris, the worst Vice President in the history of the United States and a person with a low IQ, is campaigning with ‘stupid like a rock’. War Hawk, Liz Cheney, who like her father, the man who pushed Bush to ridiculously go to war in the Middle East, also wants to go to war with every Muslim country known to man.
More than a hundred former Republican officeholders and officials joined Harris last week in Washington Crossing, Pennsylvania, not far from where General George Washington led hundreds of troops across the Delaware River to a major victory in the Revolutionary War. At a rally there, Cheney told Republican voters that voting for Democrats was the patriotic choice.
