Ex-Rep. Liz Cheney received the 2023 Paul H. Douglas Award for Ethics in Government — named after the Illinois senator and corruption fighter — in a ceremony hosted by the University of Illinois system.
On the same Tuesday afternoon when ex-President Donald Trump in Miami pleaded not guilty to 37 federal felony counts stemming from his alleged mishandling of classified documents, I decided to head over to Capitol Hill to see Liz Cheney get an ethics award named for Illinois’ anti-corruption warrior, Sen. Paul Douglas.
Cheney is the Wyoming Republican whose House career ended after three terms, un-electable because she was the vice chair of the Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol. Cheney and former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, R-Ill., were the only Republicans on the panel, and for that they sacrificed their seats in Congress as the GOP morphed into the party of Trump.
Now she is devoting herself to making sure Trump is never elected to office again. In her remarks — where she did not mention Trump by name or his arraignment Tuesday in Miami — she underscored how we can’t take our democracy for granted. “We have a continued assault on the rule of law in this country.”
Two things are true now at the same time: Trump is the front-runner by a large margin for the GOP presidential nomination — and he is the first former president to face a federal criminal indictment, coming after being charged in a New York state court for allegedly paying hush money to a porn star.
