If you’ve read this column before or spoken with me otherwise, you will surely already know my thoughts on the GOP. It’s not just broken; it’s beyond repair in increasingly disastrous ways. So, whenever a new storyline emerges about how far the GOP has gone from its already negative past, it feels repetitive. How can things get any worse than they already are? I don’t really know, but they keep going in the wrong direction. In some ways, it’s less that we’re learning new ways in which the Republican party is dangerous and harmful, and more that we’re just seeing those same things reinforced again and again, which brings us to this week’s example.

Liz Cheney, a Republican member of Congress from Wyoming, is as conservative as they come. She holds far-right views on most issues and has deep ties to the Republican establishment. In recent years, she was on the rise. Some analysts saw her as a potential future Senator or even Speaker of the House. Now, she’s potentially going down. The leadership position of Conference Chair that she holds, and which makes her the third-highest ranking Republican in the U.S. House, is in danger. While she survived a vote several months ago that threatened to remove her from that post, she now is likely going to face another vote in the coming days. This time, people from reporters to her own colleagues expect that she will be ousted.

The reason Liz Cheney may lose her position in leadership is not that she departed from the party’s basic positions or because she did something conventionally disqualifying, like getting involved in a scandal. What may have unconventionally disqualified her though, and what she did do, is tell the truth. Cheney has been a critic of former President Donald Trump. She voted for his second impeachment in January and has publicly refuted his lies about the 2020 election. For this, she has been shamed and attacked, seen as a traitor to the Republican party.

Trump lost. It’s not his party to control anymore, or at least it wouldn’t be if this was a conventional time in American politics. But it’s not a conventional time, and party leaders are still leading as if Trump is the standard-bearer. For many voters, he still is. He may even run for President again in 2024. For politicians like Cheney, whose extremely conservative views aren’t extreme enough anymore, that means trouble.

If politicians like Cheney, who are by no means people who I’d say should be in government or who are putting people’s needs first, are pushed out, then who will be left? Will Congress be half made up of more Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor-Greene-type figures? It’s hard to say that this situation is a new or worse sign that the Republican party is in very dangerous territory. There are just too many of those signs, many of them as bad or worse than this one. It is, however, yet another one being added to the heap. And that heap is a terrifying one.