Liz Cheney Destroys ‘Pathetic Figure’ Kevin McCarthy’s Legacy: ‘Important Not to Minimize The Damage He Did’

Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), once the chair of the House GOP conference, pulled no punches while describing the legacy of former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) on Wednesday’s episode of The Bulwark podcast.

“Just give me your Kevin McCarthy take,” host Charlie Sykes asked Cheney on the same day McCarthy announced his retirement from Congress at the end of the month – likely ending his political career.

“Well, I think that he’s a pathetic figure in many ways in our history,” Cheney began, adding:

But I also think it’s important not to minimize the damage that he did, because even though he’s somebody who didn’t seem to have strong ideological beliefs, he was leading the Republicans in the House.

And at each moment when his determination to do the right thing could have made a difference, he determined instead to do the wrong thing. And so I talk in the book, for example, about the whole process of objecting to electoral votes. And we’d obviously gone through a huge debate internally about it. But once the violence happened, you know, I obviously made clear that I believed it was unconstitutional to object, and I certainly assumed that in the hours after the attack on the Capitol, there would not be a continuation of the objections.

Cheney, who chaired the House January 6th Committee, has spoken at length in recent days about the legacy of that event while promoting her new book titled, Oath and Honor.

“And in fact, that’s what Kevin told me. He was not going to continue the objections, but then he did,” she continued, referring to electoral vote count following the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6th.

“And it’s just an example where there are these moments where because he was the leader, had he done the right thing, he could have taken a lot of people with him. And instead, he sort of led the conference again and again and again down this path where it ended up with Donald Trump maintaining a real grip on a conference that was dependent on him, particularly for campaign money,” she concluded.

Listen to the full podcast here.