As Trump pleads not guilty, Liz Cheney warns: ‘We have a continued assault on the rule of law in this country’

WASHINGTON — On the same Tuesday afternoon when ex-President Donald Trump in Miami pleaded not guilty to 37 federal felony counts stemming from his alleged mishandling of classified documents, I decided to head over to Capitol Hill to see Liz Cheney get an ethics award named for Illinois’ anti-corruption warrior, Sen. Paul Douglas.

Cheney is the Wyoming Republican whose House career ended after three terms, un-electable because she was the vice chair of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. Cheney and former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., were the only Republicans on the panel, and for that they sacrificed their seats in Congress as the GOP morphed into the party of Trump.

Now she is devoting herself to making sure Trump is never elected to office again. In her remarks — where she did not mention Trump by name or his arraignment Tuesday in Miami — she underscored how we can’t take our democracy for granted. “We have a continued assault on the rule of law in this country.”

Two things are true now at the same time: Trump is the front-runner by a large margin for the GOP presidential nomination — and he is the first former president to face a federal criminal indictment, coming after being charged in a New York state court for allegedly paying hush money to a porn star.

Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, received the 2023 Paul H. Douglas Award for Ethics in Government in a ceremony in the Dirksen Senate Office Building hosted by the University of Illinois Institute of Government and Public Affairs.

Douglas, a Democrat, represented Illinois in the Senate from 1949 to 1967 with his reputation for integrity such that he is seen as the gold standard when it comes to ethics. He died in 1976.

(The Dirksen Building is named after another Illinois senator, Everett McKinley Dirksen, a Republican who served in the Senate from 1951 to 1969.)

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., who as a Georgetown University student interned for Douglas, said in his remarks, “With our democracy in grave peril, Liz Cheney made a decision that seemed to some to defy her upbringing. She stood up for her party. At great personal and political risk, she told the truth.

“And she insisted on accountability. Even when threatened with the loss of her leadership post and her seat in Congress, she refused to defend the man who had summoned the mob, or parrot his lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen,” Durbin said.

Said Cheney, “When you think about the challenges our country is facing, you think about the gravity and magnitude of those challenges — If we don’t elect people who are up to the task of meeting these challenges, we won’t be successful. And so we need to find a way to step back from the abyss, find a way to say, ‘we know we disagree with each other, there’s no question’ and find a way instead to say, ‘let’s encourage and incentivize positive substantive exchanges.’”

“Let’s recognize that that’s the way our nation will be served best. Please, if there are people in this room who have thought about running for office, I don’t care what party you belong to. As long as you’re not an election denier and you believe in the Constitution, put your name on the ballot and run for office.”

Cheney said, “none of us can be a bystander. None of us can. It can be really, I think, tempting in many ways to fall into this idea that somehow our republic will sustain itself, that somehow the United States, because we are the oldest democracy in the world, that we’ll always be able to say we live in a healthy and vibrant democracy. But it isn’t true. It’s not true that those institutions are self-sustaining.

“We certainly saw that on Jan. 6, and we see it again today. We have a continued assault on the rule of law in this country.”

In closing, Cheney warned, “I believe, I know that we still live in a moment of real peril.” But the history — and the greatness of our nation — shows, she said, “we have faced peril” and “we prevail,” and “we can do that again.”