Wyoming Republican Liz Cheney was ousted from her leadership position in the House GOP caucus for refusing to peddle former President Donald Trump’s election lies. However, in her recent interview with Axios’ Jonathan Swan, Cheney appeared to sidestep linking the recent Republican-led voting restriction efforts to Trump’s election lies.
Over the weekend, Swan questioned Cheney on the link between the Republican-led efforts in the country to place restrictive voter laws to the former president’s baseless claims of election or voter fraud. Many advocates have already condemned the efforts, as it would disproportionately affect communities of color, withholding them of their rights to vote. Cheney refused to directly say if there is a link between the two or not.
“You don’t see any linkage between Donald Trump saying the election’s stolen and Republicans in all these state legislatures rushing to put in place these restrictive voter laws?” Swan pressed Cheney.
“I think you have to look at the specifics of each of those efforts. If you look at the Georgia laws, for example, there’s been a lot that’s been said nationally about the Georgia voter laws that turned out not to be true,” said the Wyoming lawmaker.
Swan pressed Cheney further, citing that around the time Trump was trying to contest the election results in his favor, around 400 bills were introduced by state GOP lawmakers, 90 percent of which were Republican-led and supported by the RNC. Cheney maintained that “everybody should want a situation and a system where people who ought to be able to vote and have the right to vote should and people who don’t shouldn’t.”
Cheney is up for reelection in 2022, and her challenger recently faced a lot of backlash especially from a group advocating against sexual assault. Wyoming state senator Anthony Bouchard revealed that he impregnated a 14-year-old girl when he was 18 years old. Bouchard compared their relationship to “Romeo and Juliet.”
Bouchard blamed “dirty politics” for the story getting out and is still set to challenge Cheney for her seat in the House. Bouchard confirmed the girl’s age to a local news outlet following the story he shared on a Facebook Live video. Bouchard married the girl when she was 15 and he was 19, only for them to divorce three years later.