The Carbon County Republican Party unanimously passed a resolution on Saturday refusing to recognize Cheney as a Republican representative of Wyoming. Members called on Cheney to change her party affiliation and for House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and other House leaders to separate the GOP from the Wyoming legislator.
Removing her from her committee assignments and the House Republican Conference should be done swiftly, so as to “expedite her seamless exodus from the Republican Party,” the resolution said.
Joey Correnti IV, chairman of the Carbon County Republican Party, said in an interview on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast that they don’t have the power to remove Cheney from her position in Congress. However, as the sole representative from Wyoming, Correnti criticized her for failing to represent the will of the Republican Party.
“We need to put something legitimate on paper to let her know and let the people know these are not the kind of actions and focuses we are interested in seeing with our brand attached to it anymore,” Correnti said.
Cheney’s been the target of heavy criticism from within her own party after she voted to impeach former President Donald Trump. The Carbon County GOP censured her nearly immediately after the vote, accusing her of supporting impeachment without “quantifiable evidence.” Although Cheney initially had support from leaders in the party, including McCarthy, her vocal breaking with Trump prompted House Republicans to vote to remove her from her leadership position in the conference.
She’s the sole representative from Wyoming and the Carbon County Republican Party said her losing the leadership position devalues the political influence of the state.
Cheney is facing a tough primary election and Trump is throwing his weight behind efforts to remove her from office. He’s advocated for Republicans to rally around a single candidate, so as to consolidate primary votes in opposition to her, and has met with several people campaigning against her.
The representative won reelection in November handily, but polling indicates she may be in trouble in a heavily red state that overwhelmingly voted for Trump. A recent poll found she was more popular with Democrats than Republicans and Saturday’s resolution accused her of rejecting “the voices of her own constituents.”
Cheney refused to apologize or back down from her stance on Trump and defended her vote to impeach him for a historic second time. She told Fox News in February that she was compelled to vote in favor of impeachment because of the oath she took to the Constitution and called Trump’s claims that the election was stolen or rigged a “lie.”
“The single greatest threat to our republic is a president who would put his self-interest above the Constitution, above the national interest,” Cheney said. “We’ve had a situation where President Trump claimed for months that the election was stolen, and then apparently set about doing everything he could to steal it himself. And that ended up in an attack on the Capitol.”
Those who see Trump as the future of the party haven’t warmed to Cheney’s defense of her vote and McCarthy criticized her acceptance of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s invitation to serve on the January 6 committee.
Wyoming’s statewide GOP also censured Cheney and Correnti is advocating for other segments of Wyoming’s GOP to follow Carbon County’s suit by refusing to recognize Cheney. Their own resolution followed on the heels of the Park County Republican Party issuing similar sentiments to Cheney. In a Thursday letter to the Republican legislator the county GOP said they would no longer recognize Cheney as their representative.
“In the immortal words of our 45th president of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump…‘You’re fired,’” both the letter and Carbon County’s resolution stated.
