A (partial) defense of Liz Cheney

Conservatives all over the internet and in my inbox are blasting the Republican former congresswoman from Wyoming today because she purportedly backtracked on her long-standing anti-abortion position. In truth, though, Cheney did not say what some social media posts alleged. What she did say, apart from saying it while campaigning for a radically abortion-rights candidate, is largely defensible from an anti-abortion standpoint.

Additionally, Cheney deserves a defense more broadly for her decisions about how to oppose the candidacy of former President Donald Trump. One can disagree with her choices, but it is entirely unfair to question her motives or her sincerity or to accuse her of abandoning her principles.

Let’s start with the abortion comments in question. They came on Oct. 21 at a Malvern, Pennsylvania, town hall campaign appearance with Vice President Kamala Harris. Taking questions from the audience and moderator Sarah Longwell, an anti-Trump Republican strategist, Harris and Cheney spoke broadly and at length about why they were putting aside stark ideological differences to campaign together. Then they talked about foreign policy, then about Harris’s stock campaign line about “turning a page,” and then about elder-care.

Only after all that prologue came an audience question about the purportedly “terrible” rates of “maternal mortality.” Harris answered by talking about prenatal care, postpartum care, the need for more rural hospitals, better public information for women, and “a whole array of care” that was affected by the Supreme Court’s essentially anti-abortion Dobbs decision in 2022. Of course, she offered the usual abortion-rights lines about “real harm” to women in the wake of Dobbs.

That’s when Cheney piped in. Despite social media posts claiming she said the Dobbs decision itself “went too far,” which would have unambiguously contradicted her long-standing principles, she said nothing of the kind. Instead, she expressed concern about what individual states have done in reaction to Dobbs.

“I think there are many of us around the country who have been pro-life but who have watched what’s going on in our states since the Dobbs decision and have watched state legislatures put in place laws that are resulting in women not getting the care they need,” Cheney said.

And: “In places like Texas, for example, the attorney general is talking about suing, is suing to get access to women’s medical records, that’s not sustainable for us.”

At a later event in Wisconsin, Cheney elaborated, when speaking on the same subject, that this country needs a president “who understands how important compassion is.”

That’s all Cheney said.

And she is 100% correct. While media reports, some of them flagrantly dishonest, have misrepresented some state laws and the details of some cases where women suffered pregnancy-related tragedies, it is an indisputable fact that a number of women, for various reasons, have suffered major, adverse health effects in the wake of Dobbs. Doctors and distinguished lawyers alike have said that some state laws are written without proper clarity, and it is indisputable that doctors afraid of unclear post-Dobbs laws have refused to do surgeries that women needed.

CNN cited one Marlena Stell, who “had a miscarriage [and] begged her doctor for help but instead was forced to walk around for at least two weeks [in severe pain] with fetal remains inside her because of strict anti-abortion laws. Stell, who was 9½ weeks pregnant at the time, said she was ‘blindsided’ when her doctor showed her an ultrasound image showing the fetus was no longer alive, and then refused to do the standard surgery to remove the fetal remains.”

The new Texas law does not make clear what qualifies as an abortion (unless one knows, without prompting from the new law, to cross-reference yet another part of the Texas code). As CNN reports accurately, “doctors in states with strict anti-abortion laws worry they’ll be prosecuted for performing an abortion when they were actually providing miscarriage care.”

Meanwhile, although most media reports somewhat mischaracterize what Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton did with regard to medical files, Cheney is right that he is indeed suing to get women’s medical records.

There is absolutely nothing Cheney said that isn’t true, nothing that criticizes Dobbs itself, and nothing that contradicts bedrock anti-abortion principles. Honest anti-abortion supporters can think Paxton went too far. And every anti-abortion supporter on the planet should express and act on the basis of “compassion” for women caught by poorly written laws combined with doctors poorly informed about what the laws say.

And compassion, too, for those women who are justly scared by loons such as the Louisiana legislator who literally introduced laws to imprison women who secure abortions, or, worse, the monstrous Texas lawmakers who want to impose the death penalty for doing so.

Now, with all of that said, some of us think Cheney went too far. Not, to be clear, that her motives are wrong or her principles abandoned, but just that her judgment seems a bit off.

It is one thing to decide that even someone, Harris, whom she publicly called a “radical liberal,” is less objectionable than the president, Trump, who tried to overturn the election and who Cheney obviously truly believes is a “danger to the Constitution.” It is another thing to campaign alongside the radical liberal and nod along even as the radical spouts radical nostrums. And even if Cheney does so, she should be willing to push back on essential matters of principle, such as on abortion, before noting areas of agreement at the margins, such as on poorly written state laws.

Those, though, are differences of emphasis and honest judgment about the respective demerits of the candidates. Cheney’s critics, though, accuse her not of mere disagreement but of bad character.

It’s not just the atrocious, Constitution-trashing vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance saying that Cheney “is motivated by an obsessive hatred of the people who cost her Wyoming congressional seat, not by love of this country.” It also is otherwise thoughtful conservative writers who tweet that Cheney “has abandoned all of her principles because she wants a Cabinet seat in a Harris administration.”

Seriously? This is a woman who was willing to give up the fourth-ranking position in the entire House, along with a House seat from Wyoming she could have held for life when all she needed to do was toe Trump’s line the way other House Republican sycophants did. All because she is dying to be Secretary of the Interior? Really?

Or could it be that she genuinely thinks that nobody should be president again when, as president, he was willing to overturn election results duly certified in every state, enlist a mob to frighten lawmakers away from their ministerial duty to ratify those results, and refuse to call off the mob when it invaded the Capitol and beat police nearly to death.

Oh, and is it hard to understand that the daughter of a vice president would be particularly mortified that the same president continued to rile up the mob specifically against his own vice president, even when he knew the mob was calling for the vice president’s execution? And that when told Vice President Mike Pence was in danger, the mob came within 100 feet and less than a minute of catching Pence’s family, the president reportedly said either that “Mike deserves it” or “So what?”

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Even if someone thinks, as I do, that Cheney, in reaction to Trump’s dangers, has too closely embraced Harris, the only fair-minded assumption is that Cheney honestly sees Harris’s flaws as less of an existential threat to the Constitution than Trump is.

The person who can’t understand or credit the depth of Cheney’s legitimate concerns – the person who impugns her character – is the one whose judgment and fair-mindedness are both abortive.