Cheney vows to fight Republicans who deny Trump election loss

WASHINGTON • US Representative Liz Cheney has vowed to oppose Republican candidates who back Mr Donald Trump's falsehoods about a stolen 2020 election. She also declared Senators Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley "unfit" for office after they voted to overturn the presidential results.

Ms Cheney, who is the former president's leading critic and vice-chair of the congressional committee investigating the Jan 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol by his supporters, told ABC's This Week that a broad movement of election denial could undermine the US constitutional order if left unchecked.

The daughter of former vice-president Dick Cheney has said she will spend the next two years trying to stop Mr Trump from returning to the White House in 2024, possibly with her own presidential bid. She declined to tell ABC if she would run inside or outside the Republican Party, should she make a presidential bid.

"I'm going to be very focused on working to ensure that we do everything we can not to elect election deniers," Ms Cheney said in an interview recorded last week, days after she lost her Republican primary race in Wyoming to a Trump-backed candidate.

Republicans are favoured to take control of the House but could face a bigger challenge capturing a Senate majority in the Nov 8 midterm elections, which will determine the balance of power in Congress for the next two years. Neither Mr Cruz nor Mr Hawley is up for re-election in November.

As one of two Republicans on the House Jan 6 committee, Ms Cheney has been able to draw a direct connection between the deadly melee and Mr Trump's repeated false claims that he won the 2020 election against President Joe Biden. "Donald Trump is certainly the centre of the threat," she said. "What he's created is a movement on some level that is post-truth."

Ms Cheney's re-election loss in Wyoming last week was widely seen as a victory for Mr Trump's revenge campaign against House Republicans who voted to impeach him after the Jan 6 riot. She told ABC she heard from Mr Biden afterwards, saying: "We had a very good talk, a talk about the importance of putting the country ahead of partisanship."

REUTERS