Former Texas solicitor general and current Republican U.S. Senate candidate Ted Cruz told The Daily Caller that he expects every member of Congress to step up the push for answers and accountability with regard to Operation Fast and Furious. Cruz also said that he thinks Attorney General Eric Holder should resign, that President Barack Obama should fire him or that the U.S. House of Representatives should move to impeach him.
“Fast and Furious is an outrage,” Cruz told The Daily Caller at this weekend’s Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington, D.C. “I’ve spent much of my adult life in law enforcement. The idea that our federal law enforcement was knowingly and willingly selling guns to Mexican drug cartels and that those guns have been used to murder innocent civilians and murder a federal law enforcement officer, I mean, that is truly shocking. It is outrageous and no one has been held accountable. I’ve been speaking out on this a long time. People all over Texas and all over the country are outraged, and Eric Holder needs to resign. Whatever he knew, or didn’t know, ultimately, the buck stops with him in the Department of Justice and the idea that ours is running guns to Mexican drug cartels. You can’t make this stuff up. He needs to submit his resignation and if he doesn’t submit his resignation, President Obama needs to fire him because our U.S. Department of Justice cannot be providing guns to criminals.”
As of Monday, 103 members of the House have demanded Attorney General Eric Holder’s resignation or firing over the scandal, signed an official resolution of “no confidence” in Holder, or both. Sens. Jim DeMint of South Carolina, Johnny Isakson of Georgia and James Inhofe of Oklahoma; all major Republican presidential candidates; and two sitting governors — Bobby Jindal of Louisiana and Rick Perry of Texas — have demanded Holder’s resignation, too.
Cruz said the groundswell in Congress against Holder isn’t enough. He expects every member of Congress to step up and push for accountability.
“Every member of Congress should speak out,” Cruz told TheDC. “There needs to be accountability and there needs to be responsibility for this. If President Obama ignores those calls [for Holder’s resignation] — and sadly, we’ve seen a pattern from this president of disregarding the law, disregarding the Constitution and jamming his agenda down the throats of the American people — if President Obama continues to ignore those calls, the U.S. House of Representatives should initiate impeachment proceedings. The Constitution provides a mechanism for a cabinet member who is running his agency in a way that is harming the American people, that is within the authority, constitutionally, of the U.S. House of Representatives: If Eric Holder won’t submit his own resignation and President Obama won’t fire him, then the House of Representatives should impeach him.”
Cruz added that it appears Holder and other Justice Department officials responsible for Fast and Furious aren’t being held to the same standards any private citizens would be held to if they engaged in similar activity. “If you or I sold automatic weapons to a drug cartel, and those weapons were used to murder innocent citizens, you or I would go to prison,” Cruz told TheDC. “That’s the way that criminal laws work. We need to know what the attorney general knew and when he knew it. But, regardless of what he knew, this happened under his watch and he needs to resign because that’s the act of a responsible leader.”
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