Harriet Hageman: who is the Republican who beat Liz Cheney?
The lawyer seems to be the perfect candidate to hold Trump’s rightwing banner into the midterms – however she hasn’t always been aboard his train
A conservative lawyer with a passion for thwarting environmentalists, Harriet Hageman would seem to be a perfect candidate to hold Donald Trump’s rightwing banner into November’s midterm elections.
On Tuesday night she beat incumbent and member of Wyoming’s political royalty, Liz Cheney, for the thinly populated western state’s solitary seat in the United States House of Representatives of Representatives.
After trouncing Cheney, Trump’s most vocal critic at intervals the party, Hageman, 59, has a clear run at election success. In an overwhelmingly red state, Cheney defeated her Democratic competition in 2020 by a margin of virtually 3 votes to at least one.
Hageman, however, has not invariably been such an enthusiastic passenger aboard the Trump train.
Her stance has shifted from calling him “the weakest candidate” in the 2016 primaries, once she tried to assist maneuver Texas senator Ted Cruz into the Republican presidential nomination, to “the greatest president of my lifetime” when she eagerly embraced Trump’s endorsement as his chosen candidate to topple Cheney, his latest bete noire.
Neither is that this her 1st foray into politics. She was a losing candidate in Wyoming’s 2018 contest for state governor, finishing a distant third to the eventual winner, Mark Gordon, and one alternative within the Republican primary, with barely 200th of the vote.
Hageman’s political positions are rooted in the minutiae of her career as an endeavor lawyer representing Wyoming’s ranchers, and advocating for energy industries against federal protections for water, land and the endangered gray wolf.
A 1989 graduate of the University of Wyoming’s faculty of law, her most successful case, according to the new york Times, was persuading a judge in 2003 to block regulations from Bill Clinton’s presidency protective many acres of national forests from road-building, mining and alternative development.
She may be a vocal supporter of the fossil fuel trade, telling supporters at a campaign event earlier this month that coal was AN “affordable, clean, acceptable resource that we tend to all should be using”.
She has previously also angered activist groups as well as Defenders of the Wild for her positions on endangered species.