I’m always trying to look for the lesson underneath the event. It’s my firm belief that life is a series of events that teaches you things if you’re paying attention.
The recent loss of Liz Cheney’s congressional seat in Wyoming had a lot of lessons attached to it, but the biggest one of all was one that politicians should be paying attention to.
Cheney’s loss was nothing short of decisive. She didn’t lose by a little, actually losing by a whopping 37 percent to her challenger Harriet Hageman. The people of Wyoming spoke loudly and clearly. In no uncertain terms, they told Cheney that she was fired, and she should begin packing up her things.
And the beautiful part is that Cheney has no choice but to abide by that decision.
This is because the power that she wielded as a representative or even a member of the January 6 committee, wasn’t hers. It was lent to her by the people of Wyoming who elected her to go to Washington and conduct their business. It wasn’t a gift that she could utilize for her own whims, which is exactly what she did.
Cheney used her position in order to enact a very, very personal agenda against a man who wasn’t even in office. Her hatred and possible fear of him caused her to hyper-focus on punishing him, and in the process, she found herself among the very people that her party elected her to resist.
So they stripped that power from her.
The lesson is pretty clear: The person or people that give you power is the person or the people that you serve. Unless you somehow got the power through a violent takeover and now claim that power as your own, you’re using gifted power. Gifted power always comes with a price, and that price is whatever the entity that gave you power says it is.
This is especially true here in America, where rarely does non-service to the people get rewarded with extra time in power. There are exceptions such as Nancy Pelosi and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but these exceptions are rare, and primarily exist on the left.
Republicans are typically very happy to vote out politicians that fail to do what they’re supposed to once in office. The Tea Party is excellent proof of this, and the election of President Donald Trump is another. Now we also have the defeat of Liz Cheney.
It’s pretty apparent that many politicians in America have forgotten that they’re here to serve, not here to rule. There’s something that creeps into the vernacular of politicians who lose the plot during their time in Washington. They begin to speak less and less of the people they represent and more and more about wheeling and dealing in Washington. They’ll sign bills they haven’t read simply because their party leaders told them to, often leaving the people back home to clean up the mess.
It’s easy to forget whom you serve when the culture you live in is one of self-service, but today was a stark reminder for many politicians and it’s a good reminder to give them. They are, through and through, servants. The power they hold is borrowed. The decisions they make are not their own. They are a vessel through which the people that elected them can speak. Nothing more.
If a politician forgets that, then it’s time for them to go. Allowing them to stay will create corruption on a grand scale. We can see the current state of Washington D.C. as proof of that.
