Liz Cheney, a Republican critic of Donald Trump, has lost her job in House leadership

“HISTORY IS WATCHING,” Liz Cheney warned last week, as her fellow Republicans in the House of Representatives prepared to vote her out of her leadership position in their caucus. On the morning of May 12th, one day after she delivered a fiery speech on the House floor in defence of truth and democracy, they made good on their threat, ousting her as conference chair. Her admonition might seem grandiose relative to the position at issue—the third-ranking role among the minority in the lower house. And yet, to members of both parties, the stakes are momentous: the direction of the Republican Party, the health of the two-party system, truth itself.

Ms Cheney is Republican nobility, the daughter of former Vice-President Dick Cheney, possessed of both his fierce neoconservatism and his granite self-confidence. She is a staunch conservative with the voting record to prove it. But she has committed what is becoming Republican heresy: not only did she say that Donald Trump lost the presidential election last November—as, in fact, he did—but she has refused since to shut up about it, unlike most Republican legislators who agree with her. Her colleagues find this obnoxious. “I’ve had it with her,” Kevin McCarthy, the top Republican in the House, accidentally blurted into a live Fox News microphone last week.