At a packed Thursday night meeting, leaders of Park County’s Republican Party condemned U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney’s vote to impeach then-President Donald Trump. More than three dozen members of the party’s central committee voted overwhelmingly to censure Cheney.

“Representative Cheney has violated the trust of her voters, failed to faithfully represent a very large majority of motivated Wyoming voters, and neglected her duty to represent the party and the will of the people who elected her to represent them,” reads a portion of the Park County GOP’s resolution. The two-page document criticizes the process by which Trump was impeached and says there was no evidence presented that Trump committed a high crime or misdemeanor.

County Republicans also passed a resolution that asks Wyoming’s two Republican senators, John Barrasso and Cynthia Lummis, to “stand against” the impeachment trial in the Senate; the party contends it’s unconstitutional to try Trump since he “has honorably left office.”

At the outset of Thursday’s meeting, Park County Republican Party Chairman Martin Kimmet said Trump’s impeachment and the House’s discipline of U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., were part of efforts “to keep us from our First Amendment rights, our free speech.”

“If we all do our part, we can keep this nation a republic,” Kimmet told the gathering of more than 100 Republicans at the Cody Cowboy Church. “But if we sit on our hands and we let the liberals just run amok, as it were, it’s going to get pretty yucky pretty fast.”

When the party later took up the measure to censure Cheney, Kimmet said it was “a difficult thing to do.” However, he said, “whether we like someone or we don’t like someone, there’s a right and wrong.”

Thursday’s vote to censure Cheney was cast by vocal ayes and nays, with only a few of the 41 precinct committee members in attendance opposing the measure. The only precinct committee member to offer a full-throated defense of Cheney was former U.S. Sen. Al Simpson of Cody, who questioned whether the Republican Party has become “the cult of Trump.”

Park County’s GOP joined their counterparts in numerous other counties in censuring Cheney. The Wyoming Republican Party followed suit on Saturday with a more strident resolution that called on the congresswoman “to immediately resign from her position.”

Her response

Cheney, however, immediately rejected the idea of quitting and doubled down on her vote to impeach Trump. In an appearance on Fox News Sunday, she framed her vote as part of her oath to support the U.S. Constitution.

“The single greatest threat to our Republic is a president who would put his own self-interest above the Constitution, above the national interest,” Cheney told host Chris Wallace. “You know, we’ve had a situation where President Trump claimed for months that the election was stolen and then apparently set about to do everything he could to steal it himself, and that ended up in an attack on the Capitol, five people killed that day.”

“That’s the kind of attack that can never happen again,” Cheney said.

After months of disputing the 2020 general election, in which he lost to Democrat Joe Biden, Trump spoke to a large crowd of supporters in Washington, D.C., at a Jan. 6 “Save America” rally. During that speech, he claimed to have won the election “by a landslide” and warned the crowd, “if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

Around that same time, hundreds of Trump supporters broke into the Capitol to try stopping Congress from certifying Biden’s win, leading to chaos and violence. One Capitol Police officer died of injuries he received and one protester was shot and killed.

The article of impeachment passed by the House last month — supported by 222 Democrats and 10 Republicans, including Cheney — effectively blamed Trump for the attack, alleging that he incited an insurrection.

However, Trump’s supporters have argued, in part, that the rioting appeared to have been pre-planned and started before he finished his remarks; Trump also had called for a “peaceful” march to the Capitol.

“No evidence exists that President Trump has ever called for a violent response to political opposition,” says a portion of the Park County Republican Party’s resolution. “Where in comparison, Representative Cheney’s political allies on the left have continually called for violent uprisings and destruction of both personal and public property, to include raising bail money for [those] insurrectionists.”

State election officials, the Department of Justice and multiple judges have not found evidence of widespread election fraud, but the Park County GOP’s resolution says “an extremely vocal majority of Wyoming Republicans recognize there were significant irregularities in the election process in several states.”

The state GOP’s censure resolution also asserts that the riot at the Capitol was not instigated by supporters of Trump, but instead by “Antifa and [Black Lives Matter] radicals” on the left. However, authorities investigating the incident have generally found that those involved in the rioting were supporters of the president.

While speaking on Fox News Sunday, Cheney said the idea that Antifa and Black Lives Matter protesters were behind the attacks is “just simply not the case.” She also said Trump’s claim that the election was stolen or rigged is “a lie — and people need to understand that.”

“We need to make sure that we as Republicans are the party of truth and that we are being honest about what really did happen in 2020 so we actually have a chance to win in 2022 and win the White House back in 2024,” Cheney said Sunday.

Coming to her defense

Cheney is the third-ranking Republican in the U.S. House, though her response to the riot and Trump’s impeachment jeopardized that position.

More conservative Republicans pushed to have Cheney stripped of the title — with U.S. Rep. Matt Gaetz, R-Fla., going so far as to visit Cheyenne and campaign against her last month. However, on Wednesday night, 145 of Cheney’s Republican colleagues ultimately voted to retain her, with 61 against.

“She went to all of those Republicans, every single one of them, and convinced them that they should keep her as the third-ranking member of the [House],” former U.S. Sen. Al Simpson said Thursday night. He said Park County Republicans should consider that and should hear Cheney out.

Simpson told the crowd he doesn’t know what will happen with Trump’s impeachment trial in the Senate, but “I know one thing: [Senate Minority Leader Mitch] McConnell is not interested in saving the president at all, because [Trump] lost him two seats that prevented him from being the majority leader of the U.S. Senate.”

Attending his first Park County Republican Party meeting since suffering a minor stroke in October, Simpson also questioned the direction of the party.

“What are you going to be? Is this going to be a cult of Trump people, or is it a Republican Party?” he asked.

Simpson added that, “I’ve been in it [the party] since 1952 and I see it breaking off into things like homophobia or abortion, which is impossible to handle, or no taxes.”

However, the former senator was in the clear minority among the conservative body, being among only about four precinct committee members to vote against the censure.

Cody Mayor Matt Hall was one of the others. 

“I don’t necessarily agree with how she voted … but I do agree with her guts that she got up and [stuck] by her guns,” Hall told the body. “And I guess I just wonder, if she’s got her seniority back [in the House], how productive this is going to be.”

He said Republicans can vote Cheney out of office in 2022 if they so choose.

However, Park County Vice Chairman Bob Ferguson noted that — unlike what the state party later did — the county chapter was not asking for her resignation.

“It is expressing our displeasure with ... what she did,” Ferguson said. While saying Cheney had generally voted with Trump, and in a way that’s good for Wyoming, he said impeaching a president is one of the most critical votes a member of Congress can cast.

‘An egregious error’

The county party’s secretary, Vince Vanata, called Cheney’s impeachment vote “an egregious error” and said the party had a “duty and responsibility” to censure her. 

“It was obvious that, given the speed with which the Speaker [of the House] moved on this, that it was a partisan issue,” Vanata said.

A censure, he said, would send a message to elected officials at all levels of government that, “we are their constituents. They represent us, the will of the people, and they just can’t do this because they feel they need to do something.”

“If they feel they need to do something, they can go get a teddy bear and hug the teddy bear,” he said.

Russell “Chris” Bingley of Cody said he likes Cheney personally, but offered similar criticism of her actions.

“She’s been in Washington, D.C., too long. She’s forgotten what her job is,” Bingley said. “Her job’s not to vote her conscience; her job is to vote my conscience, your conscience and the people’s conscience of Wyoming. She’s a representative.”

The party’s resolution notes that Trump received more votes than Cheney in last year’s election, calling that a reflection of voters’ values and preferences.

Richard Jones of Cody suggested that Cheney let “some personal issues and stuff interfere with her judgment.”

“We all make those mistakes, but she’s being called out for it,” Jones said, supporting a censure. “Two years from now, we have a chance to resolve that problem — if we so wish.”

Jones said he believes Cheney has generally been a good representative. He noted her strong support of Trump’s policies and that House Republicans seem to appreciate her leadership, given they kept Cheney in her position of leadership.

But whether she can ultimately overcome the backlash and win re-election in 2022 remains to be seen.

A poll of 500 Wyomingites — commissioned by Trump’s Save America Political Action Committee and conducted in late January — found only 13% would vote to re-elect Cheney. At Thursday’s meeting, Mayor Hall told the Park County Republicans that “most of us probably won’t vote for her again.”

The Wyoming Republican Party’s resolution says Cheney’s actions have prompted “numerous” Republicans in the state and across the country to leave the party or to stop participating in it. However, Kimmet said he’s gotten an “unreal” amount of phone calls from people wanting to get involved in the Park County chapter following Cheney’s impeachment vote and other events in Washington, D.C.

“I shouldn’t say that they fear for this nation,” Kimmet said, “but they assuredly are apprehensive of what’s coming.”