Liz Cheney: ‘Nancy Pelosi Is Not in Control of Her Caucus’

Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) said Speaker Nancy Pelosi has lost control of House Democrats to newly-elected “socialists” like Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN), offering her remarks on Monday’s edition of SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Daily with host Alex Marlow.

Cheney contrasted Democrats’ increasingly open “embrace of socialism” with the ethos of free enterprise.

“It’s pretty amazing that we have to have this fight all over again,” said Cheney. I think we’ve seen throughout history repeatedly that the free enterprise system has lifted more people out of poverty than any other system, [and] that it’s at the very heart of who we are as Americans, and that socialism fails.”

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“Socialism leads to poverty,” Cheney stated. “It leads to the kind of devastating scenes we’re seeing today in Venezuela, yet we have colleagues in the halls of Congress — both in the House and the Senate, and among the Democrats who are running for president — who seem to think that we ought to impose socialism on the American people.”

“So it’s a real fight,” added Cheney, “and we’ve got to make sure we’re taking it seriously and standing up on our side for the freedom we know is necessary and is right.”

Cheney remarked, “When our colleagues and our political opponents are advocating socialism, it’s really incumbent upon all of us who recognize what that means to explain to people, ‘There’s no way that the government can do all of these things that they say government should do without stripping power from the people.'”

Cheney deduced, “If you look at what happens historically in societies that go down this path, totalitarianism follows socialism very quickly, and that means the loss of things like loss of freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, because the government ends up in control of all elements of our lives. Those not espousing the party line end up finding themselves ostracized, and worse.”

Breitbart News, said Cheney, stands up for America’s “fundamental values.”

“I do think outlets like Breitbart and others are standing up for these things,” declared Cheney. “We’ve got to make sure we’re getting the message out that these fundamental freedoms really are at risk.”

Cheney noted how leftists regularly characterize historical and contemporary implementations of left-wing ideology as inaccurate manifestations of their political philosophy.

“Usually you get some sort of response like, ‘Well, it’s never really been tried correctly,'” observed Cheney. “The problem [according to socialists] is just it’s never been implemented the way it should be.”

“It’s excellent that [Democrats] are being open about what they believe,” said Cheney of Democrats’ increasingly open advocacy for socialism. “At the same time, it’s also stunning to me. There’s this whole combination of perspectives and viewpoints that you find among the freshmen Democrats who are socialists.”

Newly-elected representatives such as Ocasio-Cortez and Omar have displaced Pelosi as leaders of the Democrat Party’s agenda, remarked Cheney.

“[This Congress’s first 100 days] have demonstrated that Speaker Pelosi is not in control of her caucus, because you’ve got the far-left radicals who have really set the agenda,” determined Cheney. “Whether you talk about the antisemitism — the rise of antisemitism we’ve see — and the fact that they won’t speak against the comments of their members, whether you talk about their embrace of socialism, their willingness to violate the First Amendment with their H.R. 1 bill which would really clamp down in a fundamentally unconstitutional way on every American’s’ political speech, or the fact that they won’t even bring to the floor the Born Alive Protection Act saying that babies born alive require medical care, it really lays out how radical they are.”

Cheney continued, “Every single Democrat is responsible for putting Nancy Pelosi in the speaker’s chair. So if you want to see this continued really far-hard-left turn in America, that’s you’ll get that no matter which Democrat you vote for.”

Cheney added, “When you talk to some of the more moderate Democrats, they will say they are afraid to speak up in party Congress meetings, because they will be shouted down and people like AOC and some of the other radicals will threaten them with primary races.”

Cheney went on, “When you see some of the socialist Democrats, the freshmen, their response to the Democrats’ campaign arm — the DCCC — and the DCCC saying, ‘Don’t work with people that are trying to primary our incumbents,’ and the radicals coming out and saying, ‘Alright, we’re going to stop giving money to the DCCC.’ There’s clearly a really fundamental rift in this party.

“Are the Democrats going to be the party of JFK or the party of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders?” asked Cheney. “They’ve got to make that decision. For the good of the American people, I hope that they don’t go far-left, but it looks to me that that’s where they’re going.”

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Follow Robert Kraychik on Twitter @rkraychik.