Liz Cheney says US would be 'sleepwalking into dictatorship' if Donald Trump wins 2024 election

WASHINGTON — Former Rep. Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., said she’d rather see Democrats win back control of the House than her own party in 2024 and warned of a disaster if House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., is still leading the lower chamber speaker when Congress certifies the next presidential race.

When asked whether she would prefer to see a Democratic majority in Congress as the nation approaches 2024, Cheney noted in an interview with “CBS Sunday Morning” that she believes “very strongly in those principles and ideals that have defined the Republican Party.”

“But the Republican Party of today has made a choice and they haven’t chosen the Constitution, and so I do think it presents a threat if the Republicans are in the majority in January 2025,” she said.

Lawmakers in the House and Senate come together to "count" electoral votes after a presidential election. It's a largely ceremonial task following Election Day, but Congress' certification of the 2020 election was interrupted by the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2020.

In recent days, Cheney has kept up her criticism of Trump, warning that the U.S. would be “sleepwalking into dictatorship” if Trump is elected in the interview.

Cheney also told CBS that she would not want Johnson, the newly minted speaker, to be in his leadership post in 2025.

“We are facing a situation with respect to the 2024 election where it’s an existential crisis, and we have to ensure that we don’t have a situation where an election that might be thrown into the House of Representatives is overseen by a Republican majority,” she said.

Johnson did voted to overturn the results of the 2020 election, and his critics have called him a crucial "architect" behind former President Donald Trump's attempts to revert his loss.

Cheney, a vocal critic of Trump, is releasing a book on Tuesday called “Oath and Honor: A Memoir and a Warning” detailing how the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection unfolded and alleging her Republican colleagues acted as “enablers and collaborators” to the former president.

Cheney was the vice chair of the committee investing the Jan. 6 attack and was one of the 10 Republicans who voted to impeach Trump following the insurrection.

In her book, Cheney wrote that Johnson, a staunch Trump ally, “appeared especially susceptible to flattery from Trump and aspired to being anywhere in Trump’s orbit.”

In one such instance, she said he pressured his Republican colleagues to support a legal brief that would throw out election results from four states that President Joe Biden won. When Cheney said there were flaws in his argument, she wrote he would “often concede, or say something to the effect of, ‘We just need to do this one last thing for Trump.’”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Cheney: US is 'sleepwalking into dictatorship' if Trump wins in 2024