Down in Texas, Ted Cruz declared that he was ready and willing to embarrass himself in front of the Supreme Court, if the justices granted certiorari in a case brought by the Pennsylvania GOP. All of that’s fancy legal language that doesn’t even matter because the Supreme Court unanimously threw Trump under the bus and refused to hear the state GOP’s arguments to overturn election results. And the core issue that matters right now, really, is that Ted Cruz is one of many Republicans who who are putting it all on the line to stand up on behalf of Trump’s (false) “election fraud” whining. Cruz is doing so despite Trump taking shots at Ted’s wife and branding him as “Lyin’ Ted.”
None of Ted’s current sacrificial attitude toward a losing president makes much sense, but Ted is not alone. On Thursday afternoon, over 100 GOP U.S. House members signed onto what Jake Tapper called a “deranged” lawsuit out of Texas. These lawmakers want the Supreme Court to overturn Joe Biden’s presidential victory (while they allege widespread voter fraud in four battleground states), and on Friday, CNN analyst John Harwood spoke to the ridiculousness of the situation. Harwood assessed the situation as one of fear for these lawmakers, who believe that Trump or his followers will trash them, and they’ll do anything to avoid such a situation. Via Mediaite:
“What we’re seeing, Kate, is a demonstration by House Republicans of the extent of the rot inside the Republican Party right now. These people know what Donald Trump is, as Ted Cruz said in 2016, he’s a pathological liar. Marco Rubio called him a con artist… These are people who if Donald Trump said, ‘I’m going to trash you on Twitter unless you go smack your mom in the face,’ they would go smack their moms in the face and try to explain it to them afterward.”
The daily Harwood-ism: If Trump said 'go smack your mom in the face,' "The [GOP] would go smack their moms in the face and try to explain it to them afterwards. In reality what they're doing is smacking American democracy in the face." @johnjharwood pic.twitter.com/Mh3H2e3XnM
— Kate Bolduan (@KateBolduan) December 11, 2020
Well sadly, Harwood is probably not wrong (and I’m not even talking about when Cruz elbowed his wife in the face because, obviously, that was an accident, and I’m taking that out of context if only to remind you that, yes, Ted Cruz once elbowed his wife in the face in front of the world). Yet as Harwood states, this matter is very serious because those 106 Republicans are “smacking American democracy in the face.” Yep, he said it.