Adam Serwer, The Atlantic: “Even a lifelong conservative Republican like Cheney becomes The Enemy if she is willing to uphold essential democratic rights – such as the opposition’s right to govern if it wins the most electoral votes – above the whims of King Trump. Cheney’s brave stand looks likely to cost her the leadership position she holds, and has left her isolated within the caucus, one of the few Republicans who have chosen their vow to the Constitution over their loyalty to the party. Yet the party’s rejection of the rule of law is also an extension of a political logic that Cheney herself has cultivated for years. During the Obama administration, Cheney was a Fox News regular who, as was the fashion at the time, insisted that the president was secretly sympathetic to jihadists. She enthusiastically defended the use of torture, dismissed the constitutional right to due process as an inconvenience, and amplified the Obama-era campaign to portray American Muslims as a national-security threat. Until the insurrection, she was a loyal Trumpist who frequently denounced the Democratic Party. ‘They’ve become the party of anti-Semitism; they’ve become the party of infanticide; they’ve become the party of socialism,’ she said in 2019. Her critics now, such as Scalise and the buffoonish Matt Gaetz, formerly gushed over her ability to bring, as the Times put it in 2019, ‘an edge to Republican messaging that was lacking.'”

“That ‘edge’ was Cheney’s specialty from the moment she emerged as a rising star in the GOP. In 2010, Cheney launched a McCarthyite crusade against seven unnamed attorneys in the Obama-era Justice Department who had previously represented terrorism suspects held in the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay. The Bush administration’s assertions of imperial power in the War on Terror violated the Constitution many times over – the conservative majority on the Supreme Court agreed – and the lawyers who represented detainees were defending the fundamental constitutional right to counsel. They were affirming the integrity of the American legal system; Cheney smeared them as terrorist sympathizers, as The Enemy. ‘While embracing or ignoring Trump’s statements might seem attractive to some for fundraising and political purposes, that approach will do profound long-term damage to our party and our country,’ Cheney lamented in her Washington Post op-ed. But her colleagues are merely following her example. ‘Americans have a right to know the identity of the Al-Qaeda Seven,’ a 2010 ad from Cheney’s group, Keep America Safe, intoned ominously, as if it were referring to the actual 9/11 hijackers and not the attorneys who had represented them in court. ‘Whose values do they share?’ The Enemy has no rights, and anyone who imagines otherwise, let alone seeks to uphold them, is also The Enemy. This is the logic of the War on Terror, and also the logic of the party of Trump. As Bush famously put it, ‘You are either with us or with the terrorists.’ You are Real Americans or The Enemy. And if you are The Enemy, you have no rights.”