| The Republican Party just decided to use all its might to kick Rep. Liz Cheney out of Congress — and perhaps even out of the party. It's a forceful rejection of the one Republican lawmaker trying to forge a future for the party beyond just following Donald Trump. What's happening: As The Post's Josh Dawsey reports, from their gathering in Salt Lake City, Republicans censured Cheney (R-Wyo.) for her role in helping investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. They also changed a rule so that the Republican Party can fund her primary opponent in Wyoming and try to kick her out for good. That's unprecedented stuff (since one of the whole points of a political party is to protect its elected members). Why Cheney: She's one of two Republican members of Congress on the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack and Trump's attempts to overturn the election. She's also become a loud, forceful and eloquent critic of Trump and her party's loyalty to him.  Reps. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) and Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) in December. (Drew Angerer/Pool/AFP/Getty Images) | The other Republican on the committee, Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.), is retiring rather than running for reelection. Most Republican elected officials who have spoken out against Trump have chosen to leave their jobs, too. Cheney is unique in that she trying to see whether voters in Wyoming will support her and send her to Congress again. What the GOP says: The supporters of the push to oust Cheney, such the head of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel, used some extreme language to defend it: "We've had two members engage in a Democrat-led persecution of ordinary citizens who engaged in legitimate political discourse." McDaniel appears to be describing the actions of people who attacked and ransacked the Capitol — more than 700 of whom have been arrested — as "legitimate political discourse." Her comments come right after Trump pushed the envelope by recently pondering pardons for these rioters. Party leaders appear to have quickly developed a posture of defending the rioters. But this isn't unanimous: Look at what Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) just said. There are deep divisions in the Republican Party on this. But objectors like Romney are few and far between. It's a real possibility Cheney loses reelection because of her critiques of Trump. Cheney's responded, too: What she said is worth including in full: "The leaders of the Republican Party have made themselves willing hostages to a man who admits he tried to overturn a presidential election and suggests he would pardon Jan. 6 defendants, some of whom have been charged with seditious conspiracy. I'm a constitutional conservative and I do not recognize those in my party who have abandoned the Constitution to embrace Donald Trump. History will be their judge. I will never stop fighting for our constitutional republic. No matter what." One surprising person standing up to Trump today: Mike Pence At a speech at the conservative Federalist Society on Friday, the former vice president said Trump was "wrong" about Jan. 6, when Trump urged him to overturn the election results. "Under the Constitution, I had no right to change the outcome of our election," he said, adding, "And Kamala Harris will have no right to overturn the election when we beat them in 2024." When will the Jan. 6 committee start public hearings? Let's answer some of your reader questions. Keep them coming. When will the Jan. 6 committee start public hearings? Well, they had some last year, hosting Capitol Hill police officers to share their terror and emotions and anger from that day. But you're right, the committee has largely been working in private, interviewing hundreds of people and collecting thousands of documents. They hope to put together a comprehensive report of what they find sometime before November's midterm elections — perhaps by this summer, my colleagues have reported — and then hold public hearings to, as committee members say, tell the story as clearly as possible to the American people how close we came to democracy failing after the 2020 election. Have Americans ever reelected a president in bad economic times? One concrete way to measure this is to ask who ran and lost while a recession was occurring in the last two years of their term. Many have tried, but just one president since the Civil War — William McKinley, in 1900 — succeeded. Certainly the fact that a majority of Americans feel pessimistic about the economy right now is one of the more ominous signs for Democrats heading into November's midterm elections. Is there a law that addresses conspiracy to overturn an election? States run their own elections, but there is at least one federal law making it a felony to try to overturn those states' results. But the Justice Department, as far as we know, isn't looking into this. It has been skittish about prosecuting a former president. A county prosecutor in Georgia is looking into something like this based on her state's laws. What one member of the Jan. 6 committee — Cheney, in fact — has conspicuously floated as a potential federal crime that Trump may have committed is "corruptly" obstructing or attempting to obstruct an "official proceeding." That would seem more tied to trying to stop Congress's confirmation of the results, as The Post's Aaron Blake notes, rather than efforts to change the election results themselves. (Congress pointedly came back and finished certifying Joe Biden's win that night, windows and desks still smashed from the riot.) | 
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