Sen. Ted Cruz hasn’t yet abandoned his cringe-worthy fixation on the “Barbie” movie, but the Texas Republican managed to pry himself away from pop culture yesterday to focus on Donald Trump’s likely next criminal indictment.
In the process, the senator picked a fight he probably should try to avoid.
During a Fox News appearance, Cruz peddled a variety of tired “weaponization” claims he likely knows are false before making an extraordinary pitch about democracy:
“Joe Biden and Merrick Garland, they don’t believe in democracy. Donald Trump is one of the leading candidates to be president, and they don’t trust the voters to make that decision. They would rather try to take that choice away from the voters.”
There’s no point in trying to go through the entire segment, highlighting every error of fact and judgment the GOP senator made during his on-air appearance, but if Cruz wants to have a conversation about who truly “believes in democracy,” that’s certainly a discussion worth having.
Let’s break this down into a handful of key details.
First, Cruz apparently expects the public to believe that President Biden and Attorney General Garland are playing a direct role in Trump’s prosecution. That’s ridiculous. The cases are in the hands of a special counsel and grand jury members.
Second, Cruz also apparently expects people to believe that Biden and Garland are trying to prevent the former president from being on the ballot. But that’s ridiculous, too: Trump can run while under indictment — as other presidential candidates have in the past — and can even appear on the ballot if convicted.
It would be up to voters, and there’s literally nothing to suggest the incumbent president and the attorney general have any interest in blocking the Republican frontrunner’s candidacy. In fact, by some accounts, Democratic leaders would be delighted if Trump were to serve as his party’s nominee: Democrats don’t want “try to take that choice away from the voters”; they want to present that choice to voters.
Third, if Cruz is looking for an example of a president who wanted to disqualify his rivals, and deny the electorate a choice, I’d refer the Texan to Trump — who said Hillary Clinton shouldn’t have been “allowed” to run against him in 2016, only to repeat the sentiment four years later, telling voters in 2020 that Biden “shouldn’t be allowed” to run against him.
Fourth, Trump is overtly hostile toward democracy in ways that have put our system of government in peril — and in ways Cruz has refused to criticize, making this entire line of attack hypocritical to a breathtaking degree.
But even if we put all of this aside — we shouldn’t, but if we did — let’s also not overlook the disconnect between the messenger and the message. Cruz’s own record on democracy is shameful. As regular readers might recall, in the days following the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, after which Cruz opposed certifying legitimate election results, the senator confronted calls for his resignation. Chad Sweet, a longtime Cruz friend and a former CIA operative who chaired the Republican’s 2016 presidential campaign, denounced the senator for abetting an “assault on our democracy.” Soon after, one of Cruz’s own Senate Republican colleagues appeared on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” and said that Cruz was not only “complicit in the Big Lie,” the Texan was also one of the GOP lawmakers who had “a lot of soul searching to do.” Instead of conducting that search, Cruz now believes he has the moral high ground over who does and does not “believe in democracy.” He’s mistaken.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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