Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) was not about to let an upstart like Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) outmaneuver him in pandering to President Donald Trump’s base of support. So when Hawley announced a few days before Congress met to affirm the 2020 electoral college votes that he would object to the vote totals from Pennsylvania, Cruz put together a contingent of senators to make the same promise.
The group, Cruz’s office explained in a statement, was “acting not to thwart the democratic process, but rather to protect it.” That assurance, buried at the bottom of the lengthy missive, was meant to address the obvious concern that blocking the counting of electoral votes ran the (infinitesimal) risk of derailing the inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden, who, by all objective accounts, had clearly won the race. But Cruz and the gang insisted that because the election “featured unprecedented allegations of voter fraud, violations and lax enforcement of election law, and other voting irregularities,” they had no choice but to throw up the stop sign.
It’s important now as it was then to point out that utterly unfounded allegations of fraud and irregularities — like those raised in the months after the 2020 election — are better addressed by confronting the false claims directly and confronting those spreading them. But when the person propagating the falsehoods has an energetic base of millions of supporters, it’s much easier politically to simply treat them as valid, to try to figure out a way to both treat those unserious claims as serious and also maintain a sober distance from the nonsense. Cruz’s “we must lamentably and futilely object” approach was the narrow path he chose to walk.
As protesters gathered outside the Capitol on Jan. 6 — motivated by Trump’s rhetoric and, perhaps in some cases, by Cruz’s and Hawley’s — Cruz stood on the Senate floor to make his case.
“Let me be clear,” Cruz said in his speech on that day: “I am not arguing for setting aside the result of this election.”
No, he was just arguing that it was “a profound threat to this country and to the legitimacy of any administrations that will come in the future” that so many people believed the election had been stolen, a claim elevated by Trump and coddled directly and through inaction by people like Cruz. He worried that not objecting to Biden’s win would send a message that “voter fraud doesn’t matter, isn’t real and shouldn’t be taken seriously.”
The reality, of course, is that there has been no demonstrated voter fraud sufficiently widespread to affect any major election and, in fact, fraud is extremely uncommon. Claims that it is real or a subject of concern for senators considering a presidential election should, in fact, not be taken seriously.
But you see what Cruz is doing. He’s trying to send a message to Trump’s base that he’s with them and that he agrees with their concerns while maintaining deniability with official Washington. Cruz knows that the fraud allegations are unfounded and he knows Biden won, but he also knows that Republican voters don’t believe either of those things. So he came up with a way of winking at the base while nodding at the establishment.
And he would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for those meddling cameras.
On Thursday, Cruz joined Virginia gubernatorial hopeful Glenn Youngkin at a rally in Chesterfield, Va. At one point, Cruz joined members of the audience for photographs.
A woman wearing a camouflage hat approached Cruz and confronted him about the election results, as captured in video posted by activist Lauren Windsor. (Update: Windsor confirmed on Twitter that she was the woman in the video.)
He just can’t help it, can he? As Philip Bump pointed out in the article:
When the woman approached him on Thursday, Cruz could have objected to her false claim that Biden didn’t win. He could have clarified for her that his goal on Jan. 6 was simply to spend more time evaluating the sanctity of the vote, even though there was no reason to do so. But instead Cruz tried to leverage his actions that day in exactly the way that he’d always intended: they were his way to tell Trump voters that he’d fought on their behalf.
And so he did.
Yes, Ted is the most unctuous liar in the US Senate. But he’s not alone in this. They’re all doing the same thing in one way or another. Feeding their delusions, telling them what they want to hear, adopting Trumpish demagoguery all for their will to power.