Robert Reich: Liz Cheney and the Future of the Republican Party

UC Berkeley professor Robert Reich was Secretary of Labor
during President Clinton's first term, 1993-1997.

I must say, it is always gratifying to your Head Trucker when he sees that leading journalists and commentators have arrived at the same conclusions as he. An excerpt from Robert Reich's syndicated column this week: 

I expect that Cheney will run for the Republican nomination for president in 2024. If Trump is still alive and coherent, and most Republican voters are still deluded by him, she will lose. I hope she then runs as a third-party candidate for a new Republican Party that represents the best values of the old GOP — one that I recall from when Dwight Eisenhower was president. 

My father was a Republican. So was my grandfather. The first administration I joined in Washington was Gerald Ford’s. One of my dearest friends is Alan Simpson, former senator from Wyoming. 

But since Ronald Reagan became president, I’ve watched the Republican Party turn from a governing institution into a crazed cult. It is not just bent on returning America to what it was before the New Deal. It is now intent on turning America into an authoritarian nation. It represents a clear and present danger to the future of the United States and the world. 

I have disagreed with Liz Cheney on almost all the substantive issues she has voted on while in Congress. But on the transcendent issue of democracy — the foundation on which all other issues depend — I salute her leadership, her dedication, and her commitment. And I grieve for the Republican Party that has lost her and lost what’s left of its moral authority.

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