Molly Prince on April 10, 2019
Republican Conference Chair Liz Cheney explained on Wednesday that Democrats have strayed from the values their party has historically promulgated and need to decide if they will continue down the path towards socialism.
“Fifty-eight years ago on this very plaza, [President] John F. Kennedy was sworn in as President of the United States and after he took the oath of office, he gave a speech that was a soaring call to freedom and to service,” Cheney said outside the Capitol Building. “As we approach the 100th day of the Democrat majority, our Democratic colleagues need to decide whether they are the party of John F. Kennedy or [Democratic New York Rep.] Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and [Vermont Independent Sen.] Bernie Sanders. They cannot be both.”
“President Kennedy understood the miracle of our founding and that freedom was at the very heart of it. He understood the sacred duty that each generation bears to defend and protect that freedom,” she continued. “He knew, as he said on this plaza, ‘the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state, but from the hand of God.’ And he knew that socialism extinguishes freedom.”
Cheney, the third-ranking House Republican, has been an outspoken critic of socialism and has frequently emphasized the importance of standing in opposition to “the fraud of socialism” that Democrats would supposedly carry out if allowed.
Sanders, a self-proclaimed Democratic socialist, seemingly took umbrage with her attack on his political ideology in January, leading the Vermont senator to launch a personal attack on her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney.
“In Kennedy’s time, the threat of socialism came from beyond our borders. Today it rises in this very building behind us, the heart of our Republic, at the hands of members of his own party,” Cheney continued. “We are gathered here today to pledge to the American people that the Democrats that are embracing socialism will not prevail.”
The Wyoming congresswoman has also ruffled the feathers of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Cheney grilled environmental experts in February about the “absurdity” of Ocasio-Cortez’s signature Green New Deal, which as Cheney pointed out, aims to “totally overhaul transportation” and make airplanes virtually non-existent. The panel of experts were stumped when asked about eliminating air travel and were later reluctant to voice their support for Ocasio-Cortez’s socialist policy.
“Far too many Americans have bled and died securing our freedom. Thousands stand watch on the front lines as we meet here today,” Cheney said. “We will never let the freedom they defend be taken away in the halls of Congress. We will not allow our Democratic colleagues to make the American people slaves of Socialism.”
“We will fulfill the sacred obligation and the trust passed down to us in the words of our greatest president at Gettysburg: that ‘we here highly resolve that this nation under god, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, and for the people shall not perish from the earth.,’” she continued. “We will not fail.”