'Ted Cruz said his election objections weren’t about blocking Biden. Then someone asked about it.'
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.
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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.)
“Wondering why you didn’t do more to fight for President Trump on Jan. 6,” she says to Cruz.
“Well,” he responds, “I led the objection but the Senate voted it down.”
“But you could have done more,” she continues. “I mean, we all know that Joe Biden didn’t win this election. I know in my heart of hearts that Joe Biden did not win this election.”
“I led the fight,” Cruz insists. “At the end of the day, you’ve got to have the votes on the floor of the Senate.”
Senator, this is not the claim you made on Jan. 6. On that day, you were very clear that you were not objecting to Biden’s election but, instead, hoping to spend more time addressing the concerns of voters. You were very clear that you were not simply trying to enact the will of Trump’s supporters by introducing a barrier to the counting of electoral votes. You said then that your desired outcome was solely to assuage the unfounded concerns of people like that woman in Virginia.
This was obviously dishonest at the time, but it was still what Cruz presented as his argument.
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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.
