When the best of your party is former Vice President Dick Cheney, the man who wrongfully invaded a country under the manufactured threat of “weapons of mass destruction,”  you know you’re in trouble. But, here we are.

As the U.S. House honored the one-year anniversary of the attempted coup on the Capitol on Jan. 6, Cheney and his daughter, Rep. Liz Cheney, strolled the halls of the Capitol and the House floor in support. 

When ABC News Chief Washington Correspondent Jonathan Karl asked why he was there, Cheney told him “It’s an important historical event,” referring to the anniversary of the insurrection. “You can’t overestimate how important it is.”

He added, “I’m deeply disappointed we don’t have better leadership in the Republican Party to restore the Constitution.”

Cheney noted that his daughter is an exception. Liz Cheney serves as the vice-chair of the House select committee investigating the terrorist attack on Jan. 6. 

Ben Siegel of ABC News reported that several Democrats warmly greeted the GOP’s elder statesman. 

The New York Times White House correspondent Peter Baker wrote that there was “something surreal about watching Pelosi and other Democrats happily greeting Dick Cheney, once their bete noire,” suggesting it “says something about how Trump has changed the nature of our politics.”

Cheney also said the Republican Party’s leadership is “not a leadership that resembles any of the folks I knew when I was here for ten years,” per Politico.

As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi led a moment of silence on the House floor, Cheney and his daughter were the only Republicans in attendance.

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On NBC’s Today Show, Liz Cheney, a critic of former President Donald Trump’s, said the threat to democracy “continues,” and reprimanded Republicans who are “looking the other way,” adding, “That’s how democracies die, and we simply cannot let that happen.”

As Dick Cheney left the Capitol, he was asked what, if any, parting words he had. He said simply, “I’m very proud of Liz.” 

But, as bad as it is to find a semblance of hope in the GOP in Cheney, now even Karl Rove is slamming the GOP for refusal to decry Jan. 6. 

Rove published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal Wednesday slamming Republicans. 

“On the anniversary of Jan. 6, I’m addressing squarely those Republicans who for a year have excused the actions of the rioters who stormed the Capitol, disrupted Congress as it received the Electoral College’s results, and violently attempted to overturn the election,” Rove writes. 

Rove doubles down and asks Republicans to put the shoe on the other fit. “What if the other side had done it,” he says. 

Rove resigned from his role in the White House as deputy chief of staff to former President George W. Bush in 2007, after he came under fire for alleged roles in leaking the identity of a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agent, and the firings of eight federal prosecutors—which many believe were politically motivated.