Former Republican Rep. Liz Cheney ripped Vice President Kamala Harris for years — even after the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot that prompted Cheney’s split with the Republican Party — as a “radical liberal” who “sounds just like Karl Marx.”
Cheney, who endorsed Harris last month and will campaign with her Thursday, was a consistent critic of the former California Democratic senator and later vice president, according to a review of her past public statements and social media postings.
In April 2019, the Wyoming Republican mocked Harris — then a candidate for the Democratic nomination — for saying in a CNN town hall that America should have a “conversation” about whether convicted felons should be permitted to vote.
The question, posed by then-CNN anchor Don Lemon, was in response to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) support for felon enfranchisement up to and including Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
“Coming soon: @KamalaHarris and @BernieSanders launch their ‘Absentee ballots for al Qaeda’ program,” Cheney (R-Wyo.), then the House GOP conference chair, zinged on Twitter, now X, after the televised town hall.
When Joe Biden tapped Harris to serve as his running mate in August 2020, Cheney remained a stalwart opponent.
“Kamala Harris is a radical liberal who would raise taxes, take away guns & health insurance, and explode the size and power of the federal gov’t,” the Wyoming Republican tweeted that month. “She wants to recreate America in the image of what’s happening on the streets of Portland & Seattle. We won’t give her the chance.”
In an Aug. 12, 2020, interview on Fox News, Cheney called Biden’s pick of Harris “surprising,” considering her far-left voting record in the Senate.
“Joe Biden has really been trying to portray himself as the moderate in this race, as somebody who is centrist, and in one fell swoop here he has put somebody on the ticket whose voting record in the Senate is to the left of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren,” she said on “America’s Newsroom.”
“The American people are going to look at the substance of this. They’re going to look at what she stood for in the past, they’re going to look at what she said during the primary election.”
Cheney told a Wyoming NBC affiliate in another August interview that the pick “tells us something about Joe Biden: It tells us that he’s not really leading his party; he’s not really in charge.”
On the US Capitol steps in September 2020, Cheney also denounced Harris in a speech warning the stakes of the presidential election.
“Every single day, the Democrats tell us what they would do as Kamala Harris put it yesterday, ‘A Harris Administration with Joe Biden,’” she said. “They would defund our police, dismantle our freedom, destroy our history and abandon our founding values.”
By November 2020, Cheney was also hitting Harris for promoting an “equity”-based approach to governance.
“Sounds just like Karl Marx,” she tweeted in response to a video posted by Harris urging Americans to forgo pursuing equality of opportunity for equity of outcomes in all aspects of society.
“A century of history has shown where that path leads. We all embrace equal opportunity, but government-enforced equality of outcomes is Marxism,” Cheney added.
Even after Jan. 6, the House Republican conference chairwoman attacked Harris for being absent on the US border crisis.
“The president has said Vice President Harris is in charge of the border. Vice president Harris said she was not in charge of the border,” Cheney said in a Capitol Hill press conference that April.
“Nobody seems to be in charge. She hasn’t been there. And we have a humanitarian and national security crisis and health crisis unfolding there.”
Her predictions about Harris proved true, as the vice president ascended to the top of the 2024 Democratic ticket this past July, prompting scrutiny of her earlier support for left-wing policy stances such as banning fracking, eliminating private health insurance, removing “resources” from police departments and decriminalizing illegal border crossings.
But that still didn’t stop Cheney from endorsing Harris.
“I don’t believe that we have the luxury of writing in candidates’ names, particularly in swing states,” she said in a video message posted on X. “As a conservative, as someone who believes in and cares about the Constitution, I have thought deeply about this. Because of the danger that Donald Trump poses, not only am I not voting for Donald Trump, but I will be voting for Kamala Harris.”
Cheney will campaign with Harris in Ripon, Wis., the birthplace of the Republican Party, in a battleground state where the Democratic nominee currently leads by less than a percentage point, per the RealClearPolitics polling average.
Neither Cheney nor the Harris campaign immediately responded to a request for comment.
