It was just another Thursday in Washington.
Donald Trump was threatening to execute congressional Democrats, House members were mounting gangland-style political reprisals on one another and the following people sat next to each in the same pew at Washington’s National Cathedral to remember the life of Dick Cheney: Anthony Fauci, Rachel Maddow, Ken Mehlman and James Carville.
The former vice-president, who died earlier this month after modern medicine and a new heart let him see his grandkids become adults, would have been appalled at Trump’s conduct, amused by his coalition of the willing (mourners) and depressed by what has become of the House, where he represented Wyoming for a decade.
Cheney’s service was fittingly held the first full week his beloved House was back in session after a 54-day absence following the government shutdown. The dispiriting part is that after they reopened the government, lawmakers quickly turned on one another. Resolutions of disapproval and even expulsion were teed up, with the usual tribal, red-vs.-blue targeting of the other party — but also intra-party warfare between rival factions.
It was enough to make the bipartisan vote on the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files look like a historic triumph of Article I power and legislative branch independence.
Now a decade into the Trump era, it’s easy to focus on his aberrant and indefensible behavior. In fact, we should — it’s important to not be inured to how he acts. Calling a female reporter “piggy,” treating visiting autocrats like they’re former Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, and saying of the Federal Reserve chair: “I’d love to fire his ass.” Which was all before he went on social media to say “Hang Them” of those Democratic lawmakers who recorded a video urging military service members to refuse illegal orders.
And that was all just this week.
Yet what’s disheartening about the breakdown of the House is it illustrates that the political rot runs deeper than just one man. Yes, Trump sets the example and has modeled the worst behavior. But we know who he is. This year makes clear, however, that the institutional decay in Washington may outlast his presidency.
Republicans have full control of the government, yet there have been more resolutions of disapproval or censure (three) voted on individual lawmakers than there have been votes on major bills (one). It has gotten so bad that a bipartisan duo is introducing legislation to raise the vote threshold to censure a member, to “raise the level of sanity in the House.”
Yes, the lack of legislative activity is in part because House members wrapped many of their priorities in legislation formerly known as the “one big, beautiful bill.”
But would any student of Congress really say this has been a productive year for the House? And could anyone tell you what their legislative priorities for the rest of this session have been since the BBB was signed in July?
And then there’s that pesky Article I language, the power distributed to Congress by the Constitution. There’s not a single member of Congress who could argue with a straight face, at least in private, that they’re acting the part of a co-equal branch.
Arriving for Cheney’s service, I encountered a former Republican congressional and White House aide, a conservative, dejected by Congress’s abdication of its authority. Had I seen, he asked, the clip of House Speaker Mike Johnson earlier this month in which the speaker says he’s “cheering for the president” to win the Supreme Court case challenging Trump’s power to levy tariffs without congressional approval? “I say that as a jealous guardian of the legislative branch of government,” Johnson added, irony unintended.
Not far away was John Thune, the Senate GOP Leader and a House member himself at the turn of the century. “It’s a different era,” Thune said.
“It’s a different era,” he said again, and without taking pleasure in the observation as he surveyed a sanctuary full of old guard Republicans and the Democrats doing their duty, whether out of obligation or respect for the Cheney family’s opposition to Trump after January 6.
The audience reflected the end of Cheney’s career, and the eulogists spoke of Cheney the father, grandfather, boss and heart patient more than they did the controversial vice-president, 30-something presidential chief of staff or Desert Storm-era defense secretary.
But there were reminders of the post that Cheney cherished so much, serving as Wyoming’s sole House member between 1979 and 1989.
There were a handful of his colleagues from that era, including the few still left in Congress such as Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyerm, as well as those who also ascended to higher office, like Al Gore and Dan Quayle.
And the man who, had he won, would have been Cheney’s classmate in the House class of ’78 couldn’t help but stand in the pulpit and recall his own defeat that year.
“The Republican wave didn’t reach West Texas that year,” said George W. Bush, recounting his only loss while generously noting that Cheney was undefeated.
More telling, though, were the descriptions of Cheney’s mind and curiosity. Nobody dared say it outright in such a solemn setting, but I couldn’t help but think of what has been lost in today’s House. There’s not many Dick Cheneys walking through that door (at Cannon) and the few who are soon look to run for the Senate, governor or walk away entirely.
Liz Cheney, his eldest daughter and the former congresswoman, recalled her father as a college dropout, working on power lines in Wyoming by day but reading Churchill’s history of World War in a sleeping bag at night. She and her sister, Mary, would grudgingly go along with him as young girls as he took them to museums and battlefields, reading every word on every plaque to their consternation.
And then in the winter of his life, as Liz recalled, she and her father went back to some of those same historic sites. And even as he declined, he would still come armed with that day’s newspapers, the latest issue of The Economist and a book.
He was, Bush noted, “a serious man.”
If only the same could be said for so many in today’s House.
This isn’t to bask in blind nostalgia — those beneath the gravestones at Section 60 in Arlington and even more Iraqis should have their say in any full appraisal of Cheney’s career.
Yet nobody would argue that the current Congress and particularly this House are worthy of a great country.
There are still members who would’ve flourished in Cheney’s day, but even they are sober about the state of the institution.
“This is one of those eras in which you read Kipling’s classic poem, ‘If—’ over and over and then get up and go to work every day,” Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), the House Appropriations Chair, told me. “The aim isn’t to rebuild Rome in a day. It is just to make things a bit better every day.”
Liz Cheney can’t because, unlike most all of her former GOP colleagues, she couldn’t and wouldn’t get over what Trump did on January 6 — and her state rejected her because of it three years ago.
I thought Thursday about that 2022 primary and recalled what stood out to me about an interview I conducted with Liz shortly before her inevitable defeat that summer.
She inveighed against Trump and the danger he posed, but she said something more about her party and the institution in which she then served.
“What the country needs are serious people who are willing to engage in debates about policy,” Cheney told me then, wishing Americans would “vote for the serious candidate.”
Then she went further.
“I would much rather serve with Mikie Sherrill and Chrissy Houlahan and Elissa Slotkin than Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert,” she said, adding of her then-House Democratic colleagues with national security backgrounds: “They love this country, they do their homework and they’re people who are trying to do the right thing for the country.”
Cheney’s father had just recorded an ad for her, calling Trump “a coward,” and she was thrilled to have him by her side in her final House campaign.
“I talk to him every day,” she said. “He’s just a source of tremendous wisdom across the board, he’s such a student of American history.”
I reminded her that he co-wrote a book with his wife, Lynne, on House greats — Kings of the Hill – and she laughed for one of the few times that day. “Well, my mother wrote that — a sore subject,” she joked.
Would you have stayed in the House had your dad not so revered the body? I asked.
She dodged the question but turned more serious, explaining she was “so glad” she stayed — even though her career was nearly over.
“Having the opportunity to help make sure that we protect any future January 6ths, it’s the right thing to be doing,” Cheney said.
Her father also left the House without becoming one of those Kings of the Hill.
Had he not been appointed Defense Secretary under George H.W. Bush, the taciturn Wyomingite may well have become speaker. Cheney was House Minority Whip when he left Congress in 1989, the back-up plan for Bush after John Tower’s Pentagon nomination was rejected by the Senate.
He was a man of the House and relished that his daughter, Liz, followed him there and was even happier when she declined to run for the Senate in 2020. She seemed in that moment poised to eventually claim the post that eluded her father once he left Congress.
But five years later Liz Cheney was out of Congress, honoring her father’s fidelity to the Constitution over party and then, in a moment that spoke louder than words, stopping on her way down the aisle as his funeral ended to hug Pelosi.
It was a poignant moment, the two mothers of five and daughters of House members who rose to the leadership as political opposites but bonded when duty called.
Former Rep. Richard B. Cheney (R-Wyo.) would’ve liked it.
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