He's not merely despicable.
Sen. Ted Cruz was dining near the Capitol on the evening of Dec. 8, 2020, when he received an urgent call from President Donald Trump. A lawsuit had just been filed at the Supreme Court designed to overturn the election Trump had lost, and the president wanted help from the Texas Republican.
“Would you be willing to argue the case?” Trump asked Cruz, as the senator later recalled it.
“Sure, I’d be happy to” if the court granted a hearing, Cruz said he responded.
[...]
By Cruz’s own account, he was “leading the charge” to prevent the certification of Joe Biden as president.
WaPo
Maybe he and Trump can share a cell.
As Cruz went to extraordinary lengths to court Trump’s base and lay the groundwork for his own potential 2024 presidential bid, he also alienated close allies and longtime friends who accused him of abandoning his principles.
When did Ted Cruz ever have any principles?
Cruz’s efforts are of interest to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, in particular whether Cruz was in contact with Trump lawyer John Eastman, a conservative attorney who has been his friend for decades and who wrote key legal memos aimed at denying Biden’s victory.
Oh, gee. You think?
[Cruz] proposed objecting to the results in six swing states and delaying accepting the electoral college results on Jan. 6 in favor of a 10-day “audit” — thus potentially enabling GOP state legislatures to overturn the result. Ten other senators backed his proposal, which Cruz continued to advocate on the day rioters attacked the Capitol.
[...]
Cruz and Eastman have known each other since they clerked together 27 years ago for then-U.S. Appeals Court Judge J. Michael Luttig. Cruz’s proposal ran on a parallel track to Eastman’s memos.
[...]
“It was a very dangerous proposal, and, you know, could very easily have put us into territory where we got to the inauguration and there was not a president,” Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.), a Jan. 6 committee member, said earlier this year on the podcast “Honestly.” “And I think that Senator Cruz knew exactly what he was doing. I think that Senator Cruz is somebody who knows what the Constitution calls for, knows what his duties and obligations are, and was willing, frankly, to set that aside.”
[...]
The committee has not announced the subpoena of any member of Congress as it deliberates how aggressively to pursue that line of inquiry.
Very, FFS. And this is why:
As Cruz fought to keep Trump in the White House, he frequently noted that this was not the first time he had played a leading role in trying to turn a contested election in favor of the Republican presidential candidate. Indeed, he had laid the groundwork 20 years earlier.
Shortly after the 2000 presidential contest between Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore, Cruz — then a 29-year-old graduate of Harvard Law School — received an urgent request: There was going to be a recount of the Florida vote and Bush’s campaign wanted his help.
Cruz rushed to Tallahassee and arrived that afternoon, and he said he believed that after a “quick, perfunctory legal proceeding,” Bush would be declared the winner. But there were serious questions about who had received the most votes in Florida. By Cruz’s account, he played a pivotal role, rewriting briefs and sleeping for “a total of seven hours” in his first six days in Florida.
He'll do it again if he isn't held accountable.
Carly Fiorina, who Cruz said he would have picked as his 2016 running mate, tweeted on Jan. 8, 2021, that “we must hold people to account,” not just those who stormed the Capitol, but also “those who actively enabled this clearly unacceptable behavior like Senators,” including Cruz.
Asked in an interview with Washington Post Live in May 2021 why she thought Cruz had spread unsubstantiated claims of election fraud, Fiorina said of Cruz and others who aided Trump, “My only explanation is they’re focused on short-term political gain, political expediency and clinging to power.”
Quite simply and accurately put.
Cruz, meanwhile, is making all the moves of a likely 2024 presidential candidate appealing to the Trump base.
He went on Tucker Carlson’s Fox News show to apologize for calling Jan. 6 “a violent terrorist attack,” saying his “frankly dumb” language referred only to those who attacked police officers, not “peaceful protesters supporting Donald Trump.” He played up claims that the government was somehow involved in the attack on the Capitol, asking an FBI official at a Senate hearing, “How many FBI agents or confidential informants actively participated in the events of Jan. 6?”
Last month, he visited Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida and tweeted a photo of the meeting. He rode shotgun in the lead vehicle in a trucker convoy protesting pandemic-related mandates in a March 10 event. He posed a series of confrontational questions to Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson regarding her views on anti-racism.
Asked recently by an online site called the Truth Gazette whether he is considering seeking the presidency again, he responded: “Absolutely, in a heartbeat.”
Can't read a room.
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