House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Rep. Liz Cheney, the third-ranking House GOP member, had an uncomfortable exchange with reporters Wednesday over whether former President Trump should speak at CPAC as planned this weekend.
“Yes, he should,” McCarthy said in a brief response after being asked by a reporter.
Cheney, however, had a different answer when asked the same question.
“That’s up to CPAC,” she began, before elaborating. “I’ve been clear about my views of President Trump and the extent to which, following Jan. 6., I don’t believe that he should be playing a role in the future of the party or the country.”
LIZ CHENEY IN DONALD TRUMP JR.’S 2022 CROSSHAIRS
After a moment of awkward silence, McCarthy concluded the press conference. “On that high note, thank you all very much,” he said to laughter from reporters.
Cheney roiled the party last month when she voted to impeach Trump. Trump-aligned congress members like Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., called for her ouster from House leadership.
MATT GAETZ TARGETS HOUSE LEADER KEVIN MCCARTHY FOR DEFENDING LIZ CHENEY
House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., watches as Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., the House Republican Conference chair, speaks to reporters as Congress preps for its first votes on the Democrats’ $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill, on Capitol Hill in Washington, Wednesday, Feb. 24, 2021. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)
Cheney was censured by Republicans in her home state of Wyoming and Donald Trump Jr., Gaetz and others have vowed to support challengers who plan to primary her.
But 145 members of the House Republican Conference ended up backing Cheney, with just 61 Trump loyalists voting to remove her from her leadership role during a secret ballot vote earlier this month.
And Cheney has remained defiant in her continued criticism of the former president who remains popular in the party.
“Those of us who care deeply about our history and our future, who take our oaths and our obligations seriously, will steer our party and our nation into the future,” she told the Reagan Institute Tuesday. “We will right the unforgivable wrongs of Jan. 6. We will make our party worthy, once again, of the mantle of Lincoln and Reagan.”
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McCarthy has backed Cheney but remained supportive of Trump, even visiting the former president at Mar-a-Lago to discuss getting the House back in GOP control in 2022.
Fox News’ Paul Steinhauser contributed to this report.
Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup.
Poll(s) of the week
With former President Trump out of office, other Republican politicians, from Sen. Josh Hawley to Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to Rep. Liz Cheney, are taking their turns in the limelight. But it hasn’t exactly been an auspicious debut: New polls this week from Morning Consult/Politico, YouGov/The Economist and SurveyMonkey/Axios measured the national popularity of eight prominent congressional Republicans and found that all eight were more unpopular than popular with the general public.
These 8 congressional Republicans are pretty unpopular
The share of Americans with a favorable or unfavorable opinion of eight Republican senators and representatives in three recent polls
Politician
Share with an Opinion
Favorable
Unfavorable
Net
Ted Cruz
79%
34%
45%
-11
Mitch McConnell
78
19
59
-39
Liz Cheney
57
27
31
-4
Josh Hawley
57
19
38
-19
Kevin McCarthy
56
23
33
-11
Marjorie Taylor Greene
52
15
37
-22
Lauren Boebert
37
12
25
-13
Madison Cawthorn
27
11
16
-5
That said, there are some pretty important differences in the source of that unpopularity. Some are liked by Republicans but positively detested by Democrats. Some are disliked by Republicans themselves, raising doubts about their ability to shape the future direction of the party. And still others are established villains for Democrats but have yet to make a name for themselves among Republicans, suggesting room to grow as forces within the GOP.
These eight members of Congress can be divided into three groups. First: the controversial freshmen. This list starts with Greene, who was stripped of her committee assignments on Thursday for a litany of past scandals: associating with white supremacists and right-wing militia members; making racist, Islamophobic and anti-Semitic Facebook posts; calling for the execution of high-profile Democrats; and spreading QAnon and other baseless conspiracy theories (though she publicly disavowed them on Thursday). Unsurprisingly, Greene is quite unpopular with the general public: According to an average of the three polls, she has a 15 percent favorable rating and a 37 percent unfavorable rating. This is due largely to opposition among Democrats, who view her unfavorably by an average margin of 56 percent to 8 percent. But even in the GOP, she is divisive: On average, 24 percent of Republicans view her positively and 20 percent view her negatively.
But Greene is not equally famous among members of both parties. On average, 64 percent of Democrats have an opinion of her (either positive or negative), but only 44 percent of Republicans do. Perhaps that is because Democrats are already using Greene as a bogeyman to motivate their base now that Trump is no longer in office, not to mention that conservative news outlets like Fox News have devoted far less airtime to Greene than the likes of MSNBC or CNN. (In the month of January, CNN mentioned Greene in 472 15-second clips, MSNBC mentioned her in 393 and Fox News mentioned her in 31, according to closed-captioning data from the TV News Archive.)
And it’s entirely possible that as more Republicans get to know Greene, they may start to like her more. In 2019, we found that Democratic presidential candidates’ net favorability ratings among Democrats rose at a highly predictable rate as they gained name recognition. And, of course, Republicans view Trump, a political ally of Greene’s who has faced some of the same controversies, extremely favorably (84 percent to 16 percent in an average of the YouGov and Morning Consult polls).
A similar pattern is evident with Rep. Lauren Boebert, though she is not as well known as Greene. A gun-rights advocate who once expressed sympathy for QAnon and has ties to right-wing militias, Boebert averaged a 12 percent favorable rating and 25 percent unfavorable rating in the YouGov and Morning Consult polls. And the Democrats who are familiar with her strongly dislike her (35 percent to 9 percent, on average), but Republicans are more ambivalent: Only 17 percent have a favorable opinion of her, and only 14 percent have an unfavorable one. So, like Greene, Boebert still has a lot of room to define herself among Republicans.
But a third freshman who has also loudly defended Trump (including joining Greene and Boebert in the effort to overturn the 2020 election results), Rep. Madison Cawthorn, has barely made an impression among everyday Americans. According to the Morning Consult poll, he has an overall favorable/unfavorable spread of 11 percent to 16 percent among registered voters. With Republicans, it’s 16 percent to 13 percent, while he’s slightly underwater among Democrats (10 percent to 19 percent). Notably, however, only 29 percent of voters in both parties were able to form an opinion of Cawthorn, even though he’s made a lot of news in his short career. The 25-year-old is the youngest member of Congress since 1965 and one of the few who uses a wheelchair; yet, he has also been accused of unwanted kissing and touching, has been criticized for exaggerating how competitive he was for spots at the U.S. Naval Academy and U.S. Paralympics team, and has courted controversy for an enthusiastic Instagram post about visiting a Nazi landmark and for a racist characterization on his campaign website accusing Sen. Cory Booker of working to “ruin white males.”
The second category of Republican the polls asked about is better-known Trump allies. For instance, Hawley, the first senator to say he would object to the 2020 election results, has spent his short congressional career cozying up to Trump ahead of a possible 2024 presidential bid. (He says he is not going to run, but famous last words…) In the YouGov poll, more than half of Americans have an opinion of him — 19 percent positive, 38 percent negative. But his situation is similar to Greene’s: While he has earned the enmity of most Democrats (who view him unfavorably by a 63 percent to 7 percent margin), his loyalty to Trump hasn’t afforded him the adulation of as many Republicans as maybe he’d hoped. Only 51 percent have an opinion of him: 35 percent favorable, 16 percent unfavorable.
Compare that with Sen. Ted Cruz, another potential 2024 contender who, along with Hawley, became the face of the movement to overturn the 2020 election. According to YouGov, Cruz enjoys a similar level of notoriety as Hawley among Democrats: a 73 percent unfavorable rating versus a 12 percent favorable rating. But he is both better-known and better-liked than Hawley among Republicans: a 69 percent favorable rating and 17 percent unfavorable rating. (It’s possible that his greater name recognition stems from his 2016 presidential campaign, in which he won more states than any candidate other than Trump.) Overall, Cruz has a 34 percent favorable rating and a 45 percent unfavorable rating.
Last but not least in this category, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has a 23/33 favorable/unfavorable spread, per an average of the Morning Consult and SurveyMonkey polls. That’s driven largely by his poor 13/49 rating among Democrats. Unlike Hawley and Cruz, McCarthy has attempted to straddle the line between old-guard Republican decorousness and Trumpian populism (for instance, he said Trump bore “some responsibility” for the Jan. 6 siege on the U.S. Capitol, but he also said that was true of all Americans). But when push has come to shove, McCarthy has largely deferred to Trump (most notably with his vote to overturn the election results); as a result, he has stayed within the GOP’s good graces. His average intraparty favorable/unfavorable rating is 39/20.
But the oddest favorability ratings belong to our third group: Republicans who have broken with Trump. Take Cheney. She was one of the best-known Republicans tested, and the most popular: In an average of our three polls, 27 percent of Americans view her favorably, and 31 percent view her unfavorably. But fresh off her vote to impeach Trump for inciting the Capitol attack, she is widely disliked within her own party: 44 percent have an unfavorable opinion of her, while just 16 percent have a favorable one. This helps explain why many Trump allies have been clamoring to oust Cheney from her position in House GOP leadership. That effort failed on Wednesday, but Cheney may not be out of the woods yet: At least one Wyoming Republican has announced his intention to primary her in 2022.
By contrast, in a sentence that would have been shocking to read in 2007 (when her father, Dick Cheney, was vice president), Democrats like Cheney by an average margin of 41 percent to 21 percent. Their support is definitely lukewarm, though: In the YouGov survey, only 12 percent of Democrats had a “very favorable” opinion of Cheney, while 32 percent had a “somewhat favorable” one.
Finally, with an average favorable rating of 19 percent and an average unfavorable rating of 59 percent, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is the least popular Republican politician of the eight. He’s achieved this dubious distinction by scoring negative favorability ratings among both parties. Since he reportedly stopped speaking to Trump, intimated that he was open to the impeachment process and publicly blamed Trump for the Capitol attack, McConnell’s standing among Republicans has deteriorated: His favorable/unfavorable spread within the GOP is now an average of 34/47. But unlike Cheney, Democrats have not given their long-time adversary any bonus points for his change of heart, bestowing a terrible 12/72 rating on him.
Clearly, public opinion about congressional Republicans is all over the map. But there appears to be one common factor: A Republican’s closeness to Trump seems to determine his or her success at winning over (or repulsing) rank-and-file Americans. Trump may no longer be president, but he still looms large over the Republican Party.
Other polling bites
California Gov. Gavin Newsom has faced criticism for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic from both the left and the right (see when he attended a dinner party unmasked at a gourmet restaurant in violation of his own regulations), and he is now facing the possibility of a campaign to recall him from office. A new state poll from the Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies has found Newsom’s approval rating down to 46 percent and his disapproval rating up to 48 percent. However, Californians still seem hesitant to actually vote to recall him: Only 36 percent said they would do so, while 45 percent said they would vote to retain him.
Biden and congressional Democrats appear intent to pass their $1.9 trillion COVID-19 relief bill, even if it receives no support from Republicans and must pass through the budget reconciliation process. And a new Quinnipiac University poll suggests they won’t incur much backlash for doing so: The stimulus bill is very popular, with 68 percent of adults in support and only 24 percent in opposition. In addition, most Americans support one of its core provisions — an additional $1,400 stimulus check for individual adults — 78 percent to 18 percent.
According to Gallup, Congress’s job approval rating shot up from 15 percent in December to 25 percent in January. That is still pitifully low, but remember that in between the two polls, Congress passed a $900 billion COVID-19 relief bill, the Capitol was attacked by a mob of Trump supporters and Democrats took control of the Senate.
A Marist poll recently asked respondents if they had intentionally avoided talking to friends and family members with different political views over the past year. Fifty-five percent of adults said no, but 44 percent said they had.
According to Léger, 30 percent of Americans are rooting for Patrick Mahomes and the Kansas City Chiefs to win Sunday’s Super Bowl, while 25 percent are pulling for Tom Brady and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers. The remaining 45 percent don’t care; after all, the ads are the really fun part.
Biden approval
According to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker, 53.3 percent of Americans approve of the job Biden is doing as president, while 35.6 percent disapprove (a net approval rating of +17.7 points). At this time last week, 54.2 percent approved and 34.7 percent disapproved (a net approval rating of +19.6 points).
Kerry Defended Taking Private Jet to Iceland for Environmental Award: ‘the Only Choice for Somebody Like Me’
White House climate czar John Kerry traveled to Iceland by private jet in 2019 to accept an environmental award and defended his transportation choice to a reporter at the time by calling it, “the only choice for somebody like me.” Kerry flew to Iceland in October, 2019 to receive the Arctic Circle award, an iceberg sculpture, for his leadership on climate issues and being “a consistent voice pressuring the American authorities to commit to tackle environmental matters,” according to Icelandic outlet RUV. During the trip, Kerry was confronted by Icelandic reporter Jóhann Bjarni Kolbeinsson on whether his use of a private jet was an “environmental way to travel.” “If you offset your carbon, it’s the only choice for somebody like me, who is traveling the world to win this battle,” Kerry responded. The former secretary of state went on to emphasize his climate accomplishments, including negotiating the Paris accord for the U.S. and bringing Chinese President Xi to the table. “I’ve been involved in this fight for years,” Kerry said. “I believe the time it takes me to get somewhere, I can’t sail across the ocean, I have to fly to meet with people and get things done,” he continued. “But what I’m doing almost full-time is working to win the battle of climate change. And in the end, if I offset and contribute my life to do this, I’m not going to be put on the defensive.” Last week, Kerry recommended that oil and gas workers should pivot to manufacturing solar panels if their jobs are eliminated as a consequence of the Biden administration’s environmental policies. Biden signed several executive orders on climate change last week aimed at achieving the goal of reaching net-zero emissions by 2050. During his first week in office, the president reentered the Paris climate accord, from which the Trump administration withdrew the U.S. in 2017. Biden also canceled the permit on the Keystone pipeline, a project that would have created about 11,000 U.S. jobs this year, according to the Keystone XL website. Many of the workers are temporary, but 8,000 are union workers.
Civil rights lawyers Vanita Gupta and Kristen Clarke are poised for key roles in the Biden administration. Sam Levine writes for us:
On her last day at the justice department in 2017, Vanita Gupta considered taking a picture as she left the agency’s headquarters on Pennsylvania Avenue. But she decided against it. Gupta, the outgoing head of the department’s civil rights division, once described as the “crown jewel” of the agency, didn’t really want to remember the moment, she told a reporter who was shadowing her for the day.
Jeff Sessions, then the incoming attorney general, was poised to unwind much of the painstaking progress Gupta, 46, and her colleagues had spent the last four years building. It was no secret that Sessions opposed the kind of court agreements the justice department used to fix unconstitutional policing policies across the country (“dangerous” and an “exercise of raw power” in Sessions’ eyes). Nor were there any illusions that Sessions would try very hard to enforce the Voting Rights Act, already on its last legs after the supreme court gutted a key provision in 2013 (Sessions described the landmark civil rights law as “intrusive”).
Many of those concerns came to pass. Trump’s justice department not only did little to enforce some of the country’s most powerful civil rights protections for minority groups, but in several cases it opposed them. It filed almost no voting rights cases and defended restrictive voting laws, tried to undermine the census, challenged affirmative action policies, sought to roll back protections for LGBTQ+ Americans, and limited the use of consent decrees to curb illegal policing practices. Gupta took a job as the head of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, a coalition of civil rights groups across the country, where she became one of the leading figures pushing back on the Trump administration.
Joining Gupta in that effort was Kristen Clarke, a 47-year-old former justice department lawyer who leads the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, founded in 1963 to help attorneys in private practiceenforce civil rights. As her group filed voting rights and anti-discrimination lawsuits across the country over the last few years, Clarke spent hours nearly every election day briefing journalists on reports of incoming voting problems. Reports of long lines, voting machine malfunctions, translator issues – no problem was too small. The monitoring sent a message that civil rights groups would move swiftly against any whiff of voter suppression.
Now, after years of leading the fight for civil rights from outside the justice department, both women are poised to return to its top levels, where they can deploy the unmatchable resources of the federal government. Last month, Joe Biden tapped Gupta to serve as his associate attorney general, the No 3 official at the department, and Clarke to lead the civil rights division. If confirmed by the Senate, Gupta would be the first woman of color to be the associate attorney general; Clarke would be the first Black woman in her role.
“They are both independently legit civil rights champions with a long deep history,” said Justin Levitt, who worked with Gupta at the justice department and knows both women well. “They’re going to make a really spectacular, really powerful team.”
Read more of Sam Levines’s report here: They took Donald Trump to task. Now they’re ready to reshape the justice department
On Monday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell was the latest Republican to give her a boost, saying in a statement to CNN that she had “the courage” to act on her convictions in the aftermath of her vote to impeach Trump last month on a charge he incited the deadly insurrection that ransacked Capitol Hill on January 6.
“Liz Cheney is a leader with deep convictions and the courage to act on them,” McConnell said. “She is an important leader in our party and in our nation. I am grateful for her service and look forward to continuing to work with her on the crucial issues facing our nation.”
The statement comes as a cross-section of GOP lawmakers — from top Republicans in Senate leadership like fellow Wyoming Republican Sen. John Barrasso to some conservative House Freedom Caucus members like Rep. Chip Roy of Texas — have publicly defended Cheney in the face of the onslaught from Trump defenders eager to see her defeated. Last week, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida, a close Trump ally, traveled to Wyoming to rally against Cheney, with the former President’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., calling into the event and demanding she be defeated in next year’s primary.
The former President is focusing his political energy on targeting Cheney. According to one source, Trump has repeatedly questioned his Republican allies about efforts to remove Cheney from her leadership position and run a primary candidate against her. He has also been showing those allies a poll commissioned by his Save America PAC that purports to show that Cheney’s impeachment vote has damaged her standing in Wyoming, even urging them to talk about the poll on television.
On Capitol Hill, some Trump defenders are trying to oust her from her leadership, though it’s far from clear they have a majority in the House Republican conference to succeed in that quest. Cheney’s vote to impeach Trump, along with the votes of nine other House Republicans, is expected to be a topic of conversation when the House GOP meets behind closed doors on Wednesday. Already, some Republicans who supported Trump’s impeachment have been subject to intense backlash back home, including South Carolina Rep. Tom Rice, who was censured by his state party over the weekend.
McConnell, who voted last week along with 44 of his Senate GOP colleagues to keep alive an effort to dismiss the Senate impeachment trial on constitutional grounds, has privately told associates he believes Trump committed impeachable offenses, according to sources familiar with the conversations.
When asked by CNN last week if he believes Trump’s actions ahead of the riot amounted to impeachable conduct, McConnell sidestepped the question — and later said he was a juror and would assess the arguments. But unlike House Republicans, most Senate Republicans are distancing themselves from Trump’s actions, even though they’re signaling they’ll vote to acquit on the grounds that they believe the Senate shouldn’t be trying a former president.
Cheney has also received support from beyond Capitol Hill. Former President George W. Bush has made it clear that he supports her, with his chief of staff, Freddy Ford, telling CNN on Friday that Bush planned to praise her during a Saturday call with his former vice president, her father, Dick Cheney.
McConnell’s statement defending Cheney is more of a full-throated defense than the one offered by House Republican leader, Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California, who said he backs Cheney but said she would have to answer to their conference for her vote.
“Look, I support her, but I also have concerns,” McCarthy said last month, days before he jaunted down to South Florida to visit the former President and claimed the two were united in attempting to take back the House next year.
McConnell hasn’t spoken to Trump since December 15.
This story has been updated with more information.
CNN’s Caroline Kelly and Michael Warren contributed to this report.
Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz, one of former President Trump’s top supporters in Congress, held a rally Thursday in Wyoming to blast the state’s sole House member Rep. Liz Cheney.
Gaetz, standing in front of a boisterous crowd gathered at the steps of the Wyoming state capitol, delivered a populist speech as he repeatedly slammed Cheney as a member of the Washington “establishment in both political parties have teamed up to screw our fellow Americans for generations.”
FAST FACTS
Cheney, the No. 3 House Republican in leadership was one of only 10 Republicans who joined all 222 House Democrats in voting to impeach the president for inciting the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
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“Defeat Liz Cheney in this upcoming election, and Wyoming will bring Washington to its knees,” he told a group of hundreds of spectators, many of whom did not wear masks. “How can you call yourself a representative when you don’t represent the will of the people? That’s what all the neocons ask about the Arab dictators. I figure maybe we ought to ask the same question of a beltway bureaucrat turned fake cow girl that supported an impeachment that is deeply unpopular in the state of Wyoming.”
Gaetz revealed his intention to campaign against Cheney after she and nine other House Republicans voted to impeach Trump for inciting an insurrection on the Capitol. The measure was the most bipartisan impeachment in U.S. history. But the move against a president who has become a rousing figure for his party sparked vitriol, with calls for Cheney’s ouster from her leadership position among the caucus’ right flank.
But talk of impeachment made only a glancing appearance in Gaetz’s rally Thursday. The congressman mostly opted to portray Cheney as in cahoots with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and Democrats like President Joe Biden and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi to sustain a status quo that works for Washington at the expense of main street America. He accused Cheney of being out of touch with the cowboy values of her home state of Wyoming, calling himself a supporter of “prairie populism.”
“The truth is that the establishment in both political parties have teamed up to screw our fellow Americans for generations,” Gaetz said. “The private insider club of Joe Biden, Mitch McConnell, Mitt Romney, Nancy Pelosi and Liz Cheney, they want to return our government to its default setting: enriching them.”
The claim that Cheney and her Democratic counterparts are batting for the same team came in contrast with the congresswoman’s simultaneous introduction Thursday of legislation challenging Biden’s recent executive order on energy production.
Gaetz also attacked Cheney for the role her father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, played in the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He disparagingly called Liz Cheney a “neocon,” saying she advocated unnecessary wars in the Middle East.
“The neocons say we got to fight them abroad so we don’t have to fight them at home,” Gaetz said. “I was going to say that maybe we ought to fight the neocons at home so we don’t have to fight them in Washington, D.C. But that’s problem, isn’t it, because the neocons are home at Washington, D.C.”
“The real cowboys, I guess, fought the Indians so they could use the land, but what are America’s soldiers even fighting for that Liz Cheney sends around the world?” he added. “Places that most Americans couldn’t even point to on a map.”
Much of the event followed Trump’s rally playbook, with talking points mirroring the former president’s bombastic public comments. Trump frequently expressed his contempt for Cheney while he was president, telling his supporters shortly before they stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6: “We’ve got to get rid of the weak congresspeople, the ones that aren’t any good, the Liz Cheneys of the world.”
At one point, Gaetz even echoed Trump’s disdain for developing countries in a dig at Congress, saying: “A nation that sends its best to fight in the worst nations in the world should not send its worst to be its representatives in the United States Congress.”
Cheney’s team has largely brushed off Gaetz’ attacks, with one member of her office telling CNN this week: “Rep. Gaetz can leave his beauty bag at home. In Wyoming, the men don’t wear make-up.” (The dig is an apparent reference to Gaetz’s use of makeup in an HBO documentary about his time in office).
In a statement to POLITICO, former Wyoming State Rep. Amy Edmonds put it equally bluntly Thursday: “Wyoming doesn’t like it when outsiders come into our state and try to tell us what to do.”