On Tuesday, a Senate Rules Committee convened to discuss S. 1, the For the People Act. The Republican Party is unified under one thing: not passing any legislation that would strengthen our economy, our working citizens, and our democracy. This means that the session was filled with “a series of party-line votes on amendments made clear there is little ground for compromise,” and will only be brought to the Senate floor and voted for by Democratic representatives of our country. The good news for the country in this regard is that the Democratic representatives of our government actually represent the vast majority of American citizens. The bad news is that people like Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas are still in our government. This means that very few amendments to the bill have been agreed upon. Sen. Mitch McConnell’s only job in his many decades as a legislator has been to not pass legislation.
During the session, Cruz gave his usual factually incorrect, high school debate team-level rhetoric about how the Democratic Party is trying to create federal voting rights legislation that would foster a mythological mass voter fraud wave. This—coming from a person who pushed for the Jan. 6 insurrection against our democracy—is not simply rich, it’s the Ted Cruz brand and the reason that no one who has ever worked with him likes him. Cruz’s insistence on saying that the Democratic bill would allow "millions of people to vote illegally" was repeatedly challenged not only by reality and Cruz’s inability to provide a shred of evidence to support such a hyperbolic statement, but by Democratic senators like Amy Klobuchar. Of course, after speaking obnoxiously for the cameras during the committee, Cruz was somehow able to be even more obnoxious, playing with his phone while not bloviating.
It wasn’t the first time that Cruz’s inability to put his phone down and pay attention to his job has been noted. And like the last time, Cruz chose to retreat into his phone in order to block out the repugnant retelling of his actions and the actions of people who actually listen and think that Cruz believes even one iota of the garbage that spews out of his face. Klobuchar has a history of calling out Cruz’s tendency to lie and obfuscate the truth of things, and Tuesday was no exception.
SEN. AMY KLOBUCHAR: When in fact you, Senator Cruz—not all of your colleagues here today—you were contesting the electoral college. You were leading—one of the leaders on the effort to say that the election results were not correct. And so, you wonder why we want to make sure people have the right to vote?
In the video that you can watch below, Cruz can be seen being in his resting place: a state of complete obnoxiousness. He’s playing on his phone, sitting with the posture of a man who has thrown every person in his life under the bus numerous times in pursuit of personal glory. Was Cruz answering serious emails or texts about policy? Was Teddy sending his Venmo account email to a big money donor? No. Somehow Cruz was doing even less. Mediaite points out that right at that exact moment, it seems that what Cruz was actually doing was perusing Twitter and retweeting an image of himself in action.
Dr. Pepper is a Texas-based brand started in Waco a little less than 150 years ago. Cruz is known to drink a lot of Dr. Pepper, and in fact reportedly has a Dr. Pepper-branded, supermarket-sized refrigerator in his Senate office. The Recount account made sure to recognize the fact that Cruz couldn’t be bothered to listen to a response to the super duper long-winded drivel he vomited into the public sphere just moments before.
And because Cruz—who likes to lie about not wasting taxpayer money on fake chaperone trips to Cancun with his wife and kids while Texas is under ice and emergency—figured his next best move was to lie some more.
Klobuchar is clearly not reading a statement. She’s pointing out that Cruz’s make-em-up talking point is in fact a lie made by a liar whose only interest in the concept of democracy revolves around using the word “democracy” to sell himself.
In Ted’s defense, this is what he’s been teaching his daughters their whole lives. His miraculous bootlicking of Donald Trump after Trump’s attacks on their mother and their grandfather should serve as a reminder of the kind of character and integrity Cruz fails to have.