In a move that will spark speculation about her potential national ambitions, Republican Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming will headline an awards dinner later this autumn in New Hampshire, the state that for a century has held the first presidential primary in the race for the White House.
Cheney, one of the most well-known and vocal members of the small group of GOP lawmakers and leaders opposed to former President Trump, will be the featured speaker at the annual Nackey S. Loeb School’s First Amendment Honors program on Nov. 9. The former president and his allies have backed a primary challenger to Cheney when she’s up for reelection next year as Trump aims to oust Cheney from Congress.
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The school was named after its founder, the late publisher of the New Hampshire Union Leader. New Hampshire’s largest newspaper, which was first to report the Cheney visit, noted that the event “honors individuals or groups who have in some extraordinary way exercised or sought to protect the Constitution’s First Amendment rights of free speech, assembly, press, religion or government petition.”
Cheney, in a statement, said she was honored to participate.
“Protecting our First Amendment freedoms is at the heart of our responsibility as elected officials,” Cheney wrote. “I look forward to helping to recognize New Hampshire citizens and organizations who are working to defend those freedoms.”
The event will be held for the first time at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College, which has become a must-stop for White House hopefuls over the past two decades.
“In recent times, no other American figure has been closer to the freedom afforded by the First Amendment than Rep. Cheney,” Neil Levesque, the institute’s executive director, told Fox News in a statement. “It is a testament to the Nackey Loeb School’s national reach that she is coming to speak.”
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Trump was a past featured speaker at the event. His headlining of the gala in the autumn of 2014 was one of his first trips to New Hampshire as he began exploring a potential run for the 2016 GOP presidential nomination.
Cheney, in April, didn’t close any doors to a potential 2024 White House run.
“I’m not going to rule anything in or out. Ever is a long time,” the third-ranking GOP lawmaker in the House of Representatives told the New York Post in an interview. Cheney, who at the time was attending the House Republican retreat in Orlando, Florida, was asked if she’d consider a 2024 presidential bid.
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Cheney, the daughter of former Vice President Dick Cheney, was the most senior of the 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump on a charge of inciting the deadly Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol by right-wing extremists and other Trump supporters, who aimed to disrupt congressional…
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