Liz Cheney, a former Republican congresswoman and longtime opponent of abortion rights, on Monday condemned Republican-imposed bans on the procedure and urged conservatives to support the Democrat Kamala Harris for US president.
Cheney was speaking during three joint events with the vice-president in three swing states aimed at prising suburban Republican voters away from the party nominee, Donald Trump. She has become the Democrat’s most prominent conservative surrogate and is rumoured to be in contention for a seat in a potential Harris cabinet.
At the final event in Waukesha, Wisconsin, against a blue backdrop patterned with the words “country over party”, Cheney, 58, suggested that Republican-led states had overreached in restricting abortion since the supreme court’s 2022 Dobbs decision ended it as a constitutional right.
“I’m pro-life and I have been very troubled, deeply troubled by what I have watched happen in so many states since Dobbs,” said the former Wyoming congresswoman and daughter of the former vice-president Dick Cheney. “I have been troubled by the extent to which you have women who – as the vice-president said, in some cases have died – who can’t get medical treatment that they need because providers are worried about criminal liability.”
The current situation is “untenable”, Cheney said, and America needs a president “who understands how important compassion is, who understands that these shouldn’t be political issues, that we ought to be able to have these discussions and say, ‘You know what? Even if you are pro-life, as I am, I do not believe, for example, that the state of Texas ought to have the right, as they’re currently suing to do, to get access to women’s medical records.’
“There are some very fundamental and fundamentally dangerous things that have happened and so I think that it’s crucially important for us to find ways to have the federal government play a role and protect women from some of the worst harms that we’re seeing.”
Cheney went on to draw a contrast with Trump, who as president appointed three supreme court justices instrumental in overturning the 1973 Roe v Wade precedent and whose rhetoric continues to alienate many suburban women. “Donald Trump at one point called for criminal penalties for women,” she said.
“He’s been now trying to sort of be all over the place on this issue, although he expresses great pride for what’s happened and I think the bottom line on this, as on so many other issues, is you just can’t count on him. You cannot trust him. We’ve seen the man that he is. We’ve seen the cruelty and America deserves much better.”
The remarks echoed comments that Cheney made earlier in the day in Malvern, a suburb of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, in a striking effort to build a permission structure for conservatives to back Harris, who has made reproductive freedom a centrepiece of her campaign. Cheney, by contrast, has an A rating from Susan B Anthony Pro-Life America, a group that grades members of Congress based on their anti-abortion credentials.
Monday’s three events in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, a show of unity designed to cast Trump as a threat to the constitution, were held in counties won by Nikki Haley in the Republican presidential primary. Haley, a former South Carolina governor and US ambassador to the United Nations, had sought to neutralise abortion as an election issue by supporting states’ autonomy and rejecting calls for a national ban.
Cheney has vocally opposed Trump since the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol. Her recent endorsement of Harris fuelled speculation that she could play a part in a future Harris administration.
Earlier this month, appearing on the popular daytime talkshow The View, Harris said she would differ from Joe Biden by including a Republican in her cabinet. She was asked by the radio host Howard Stern if that might be Cheney but avoided a direct answer. Appointing Cheney would carry considerable political risks given her hawkish foreign policy and her father’s role in instigating the Iraq war.
Trump has frequently tried to paint Harris, who is from deep blue California, as a radical liberal but she struck a moderate tone during her appearances with Cheney, who lost her House seat after she co-chaired a congressional committee that investigated the January 6 attack.
Harris promised to “invite good ideas from wherever they come” and “cut red tape”, and she said “there should be a healthy two-party system” in the country. “We need to be able to have these good intense debates about issues that are grounded in fact,” she said.
“Imagine!” Cheney responded.
“Let’s start there!” Harris said as the audience clapped. “Can you believe that’s an applause line?”
Foreign policy loomed large over the three conversations as Harris and Cheney described Trump as chaotic, erratic and unfit to lead. In Waukesha, at an event moderated by the conservative author and broadcaster Charlie Sykes, Cheney highlighted Trump’s admiration for autocrats such as Vladimir Putin of Russia, Kim Jong-un of North Korea and Xi Jinping of China.
“If you listen to him, he doesn’t just praise those people generally,” she said. “He praises them for their cruelty, for their tyranny. That’s not who we are as a nation. It’s not who we are and the world needs us to be better.”
Harris criticised Trump’s claim that he would end the Russia-Ukraine war in a day as tantamount to “surrender”, explaining: “Vladimir Putin would be sitting in Kyiv if Donald Trump were president and understand what that means, as our allies understand, and that’s why they’re concerned about this election.
“If Putin were to get away with invading the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine … you think he wouldn’t march next right into Poland and the rest of Europe? Because Donald Trump wants to please somebody that he considers to be a strongman who he admires? So on this, and so many issues, the stakes are extremely high.”
But some observers questioned the wisdom of campaigning with Cheney in Michigan, which has the highest concentration of Arab Americans in the country, given her hawkish foreign policy and her father’s role in instigating the Iraq war. Many such voters are now wavering or abstaining because of the Biden-Harris administration’s handling of the crisis in Gaza.
Trump weighed in on Monday, writing on his Truth Social platform: “Arab Voters are very upset that Comrade Kamala Harris, the Worst Vice President in the History of the United States and a Low IQ individual, is campaigning with ‘dumb as a rock’ War Hawk, Liz Cheney, who, like her father, the man that pushed Bush to ridiculously go to War in the Middle East, also wants to go to War with every Muslim Country known to mankind.”
The Michigan event was held in Royal Oak, outside Detroit, and moderated by Maria Shriver, a journalist and former first lady of California.
In a nod to the concept of shy Harris voters who would rather not share their views publicly, Cheney said: “If you’re at all concerned, you can vote your conscience and not ever have to say a word to anybody and there will be millions of Republicans who do that on November 5.”
In a lighter moment, Shriver asked Harris – who turned 60 on Sunday – about what she is doing to de-stress, noting that Americans say they are turning off the news, doing yoga, “eating gummies, all sorts of things”.
Harris replied: “Not eating gummies!” and burst into laughter. She admitted: “I wake up in the middle of the night usually these days, just to be honest with you, but I work out every morning. I think that’s really important to just kind of – you know, mind, body and spirit … My family grounds me in every way.”
But Harris counselled against despair: “Let’s not feel powerless … because then we have been defeated and that’s not our character as the American people.”
More than 100 former Republican officeholders and officials joined Harris last week in Washington Crossing, Pennsylvania, not far from where general George Washington led hundreds of troops across the Delaware River to a major victory in the revolutionary war. At a rally there, Cheney told Republican voters that the patriotic choice was to vote for Democrats.
She and Harris appeared to have a good chemistry during their swing state tour. At one point in Wisconsin, Cheney observed: “If you wouldn’t hire somebody to babysit your kids, you shouldn’t make that guy the president of the United States.” The audience laughed. And no one seemed more amused than Harris herself.
