Liz Cheney Pledges to Stamp Out the Last Remnants of Compromise in Congress

There is a faint hope that politicians will compromise on some things after several years of do-nothing Congresses, and Liz Cheney wants that to stop right now.

There is a faint hope that politicians will compromise on some things after several years of do-nothing Congresses, but Liz Cheney wants that to put an end to that right now. Cheney, daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, is running for Senate in Wyoming against a fellow Republican, Sen. Mike Enzi, and her platform is that she wants to do more nothing. "In my view, obstructing President Obama's policies and his agenda isn't actually obstruction; it's patriotism," Cheney said at a press conference on Wednesday, the Associated Press reports. She also said, "We've got to stand and fight, and we have to defend what we believe in. We have to not be afraid of being called obstructionists."

Cheney's pro-obstruction platform comes just as The New York Times' Jonathan Weisman reports some real compromises are actually happening in Congress. The Senate passed a bipartisan immigration bill last month. This week, senators reached a deal to end filibustering Obama's cabinet nominees. And the group No Labels, formed in 2010 (and subsequently mocked in a bipartisan fashion) will reveal a bunch of legislative proposals with bipartisan support. Eighty-one members of Congress are involved in the No Labels effort. South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham told the Times a bipartisan group is forming to stop the second year of the sequester. You remember the sequester, right? It was supposed to be so horrible it would force the parties to work together to compromise. It didn't work.

Those are exactly the kind of things Liz Cheney wants to step. The senator she's challenging is not a liberal Republican. National Journal ranked Enzi as the eighth most conservative member of the Senate earlier this year. But he has worked with Democrats: with Hillary Clinton to overhaul the pension system in 2006, he worked with Democrats to reform the accounting industry after Enron in 2002. But he abandoned negotiations over Obamacare in 2009. Cheney wouldn't answer questions about whether she's referring to Enzi — a longtime friend of her father, former vice-president Dick Cheney – when she railed against compromise. She said, "Instead of cutting deals with the president's allies in Congress, we can be opposing them every step of the way." She wants six more years of nothing.