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And now, from the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN Audio, the Axe Files, with your host, David Axelrod.

I sat down with Congresswoman Liz Cheney this past weekend for a conversation before students and alums of the University of Chicago at our Institute of Politics.

She herself is a graduate of the law school there. The Wyoming Congresswoman, of course, needs no introduction.

A bedrock conservative and inheritor of a famous political name she was ousted earlier this year as the third ranking Republican in the House for refusing to accept Donald Trump's election lie and for supporting his impeachment.

Now she faces a challenging primary at home that will say something about the future of her party and our politics. We talked about this and more in the conversation you can hear right now.

Congresswoman Cheney, welcome. Welcome back to the University of Chicago. It's great to have you. What were you you were here in the in the mid 90s in the law school? What drew you to the University in the first place and what was your experience like here? What's the most memorable part of it?

Well, thank you first of all for for having me, David. Thank you very much for your leadership and a whole range of areas, including the Institute of Politics now.

My most memorable experience at the University of Chicago was having my first baby. Our oldest daughter was was born two weeks before the end of my first year of law school, born there at the University of Chicago Hospital.

And so that she and she will she's getting married this summer. So that tells you how long ago that was. Congratulations.

Thank you. But you think you bet. Now it was a wonderful place. I actually applied to the law school and got in and then deferred a couple of years because I was working at the agency for international development.

And the wall had come down in 1989 and I was working in the bureau that was handling the programs to help private ties and, you know, encourage democracy help build market economies in those countries that had been behind the iron curtain and then the former Soviet Union.

And so the law school very nicely let me defer to two times and then I started in the fall of 93.

It strikes me as kind of ironic. I'm sure it strikes you as ironic that you're now probably very welcome and celebrated figure on campuses across the country.

Cheney name has not been PC all the time in the last two decades, but tell me about your a little bit about your upbringing and your parents both were speaking about not necessarily PC.

They were too conservative PhD students at the University of Wisconsin in the late 60s. So that was unusual. And then they moved to Washington.

And your dad at a very early age was the chief of staff to president Ford. You would have been a young person very young person, nine, 10 years old at that time.

What do you recall of those years and was it always just assumed in your head that someday I am going to serve and someday I may go into politics myself.

What I recall of the of the Ford years in particular when when my dad was the chief of staff, of course, as chief of staff, your hours are very long and my sister and I were young and he wanted to be able to spend as much time as he could with us.

And so he would bring us down to the White House on the weekends on Saturday mornings.

We would go with him to his office in the West Wing, which is still the chief of staff's office to this day, the height of technology in 1974, 1975 was that he had a wall that had multiple televisions in the wall.

So you could put each one on a different network. And Mary and I would sit on the floor of his office in the West Wing and turn each television to a different cartoon show because the only watch cartoons on Saturday mornings.

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