If personal courtesy and institutional respect were going to hurt her politically, then Liz Cheney would just have to take the hit.
And that is what passes today for courage in the Trump-cowed Republican political culture.
Cheney found it advisable to go on Twitter the other day and explain the photograph of her mild fist-tap with President Biden when Biden was in the House chamber for his address 10 days ago.
Conservatives were blasting her for it. They saw prima facie evidence of unforgivable acceptance of the other side. They said it revealed Cheney's betrayal of the House Republican caucus she serves--for a few more hours--as the third highest-ranking member on the leadership team.
Cheney felt it necessary to post on social media that she disagreed with virtually every Biden utterance in that speech but that she would be courteous and respectful whenever the president of the United States reached out to her.
This week the House Republican Caucus will remove Cheney from her third-ranking leadership position and replace her with a devout Trumpian.
It's not punishment for the fist-tap, which was merely supporting evidence in the case against her. That was only a symptom.
It's that Cheney insisted on saying--and to keep saying--that the most important thing was to stand for free, fair and nonviolent American democracy by disavowing Donald Trump's attempt to steal an election in the face of certified results and 60 failed court cases.
It's that she insisted on saying--and to keep saying--that Trump's incitement of those people who waged an afternoon's civil war in the U.S. Capitol deserved the impeachment vote she gave it.
And on the day after House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy let it be known he wanted Cheney out of the leadership group, Cheney fired off an op-ed piece to The Washington Post making those points all over again.
The woman is as stubborn in her position as her dad was in his position that the nation should pay back Osama bin Laden by attacking Saddam Hussein.
In a pre-insanity Republican world, Cheney would be a conservative's conservative, a great liberal bugaboo. In the gone-mad world of Trumpism, where one man's lies and ego matter most, she's become something of a liberal darling.
Standing up for America is now a left-of-center position.
Cheney's position is that nothing matters if you don't first stand up for American democracy.
She is right, of course.
Imagine that Trump becomes the Republican presidential nominee for 2024. Imagine that he loses again on close outcomes in swing states. Imagine that he foments another insurrection, emboldened by the fact that his party let him get away with the first.
That's why I refer to Sarah Huckabee Sanders' gubernatorial campaign as an effort to install herself in charge of the Arkansas outpost for the next insurrection.
Owing to her willing debt to Trump and Trumpism for campaign funds and celebrity endorsements, doesn't it seem likely that she would dispatch the Arkansas National Guard to Washington to serve under the command of the Proud Boys for the next round of U.S. Capitol window-smashing?
Have I gone too far there? That would be true only if Sanders issued a statement that Trump lost the election, should not have lied about it and cannot be her party's presidential nominee again after inspiring civil war.
I don't think she'll be making such a statement. I think she's too enamored of Bill Barr's video endorsement of her for governor of Arkansas for reasons including her supposed respect for the "rule of law."
The rule of law is precisely what Sanders would break by her rhetoric of leading Arkansas' "last line of defense" against the federal government.
In Washington, House Republicans seem to have settled on a strategy. It is to talk only about Joe Biden supposedly being a "socialist." It is to spout the new mantra of "Fire Nancy Pelosi."
It is that the prospect of winning back the House in the midterms is good with that strategy, especially coupled as it now is with new voter- inconvenience laws in key states.
It is that Biden is helping with his bold big-spending initiatives designed to appease his left flank and standing little to no chance of enactment.
It is that Cheney is entitled to her opinion and to express it, but not to wear the banner of leadership as she blabbers it stubbornly and distracts from the game plan for the 2022 elections.
It is that maybe Trump will go away, but that, if he doesn't, then America will have joined them in condoning insurrection. So, what's the problem?
"History is watching," Cheney wrote in The Post.
Yes, but the midterms are more important, her GOP colleagues seem to be saying.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.