Ted Cruz Takes a Stand Against Mild, Sensible Election Reforms that Even Mitch McConnell Supports

Ever since he led them to political self-immolation with the 2013 government shutdown, Sen. Ted Cruz has been a kind of spiritual leader for the most deranged elements of the House Republican caucus. Unfortunately, those elements have now taken over pretty much the entire caucus in the lower house, and Cruz has proven a vanguard for these elements in the Senate. So it makes sense that the now-bearded senator from Texas—presumably eager to convince us that he's not just a melting Ronald Reagan wax figure with the charisma to match—would join all but nine House Republicans in opposing some modest reforms to the Electoral Count Act.

It was ambiguities in the law that gave the Trumpists an opportunity to try to steal the last election, and while there are some differences between the House and Senate bills still to be ironed out, the basic goal of both is to reinforce the notion that the certification process on January 6 is closer to a ceremonial rubber stamp than some arena for debate about who actually won the election. A real fix would be to scrap the Electoral College—a ridiculous mechanism that favors just six or seven states while robbing Kansans as well as New Yorkers of their influence over who will be president—but that ain't going to happen. Neither, it seems, will it achieve the more comprehensive reforms once dreamed of in the For the People Act.

But the Senate has shown some interest in the modest fixes to the ECA, fixes sufficiently modest to secure the support of Sen. Mitch McConnell, Republican leader in the upper chamber. But not modest enough, it seems, for one Ted Cruz.

Nearly two years on from the 2020 election, there has been almost no voter fraud discovered outside some isolated incidents that often involved Republican voters. But even if we grant that the results from various swing states were in dispute, those disputes had been thoroughly litigated long before January 6! Trump sued everyone and everything to try to overturn the outcomes in those states, then turned to increasingly aggressive extralegal means that culminated with the mob. In between, he tried to force Georgia's chief elections official to "find" him the exact number of votes he needed to win that state. And who, exactly, is frauding here? Who tried to steal the election?

Sorry, we got sidetracked. Cruz is suggesting that the bill is designed to allow Democrats to fraud harder—again, no evidence of significant fraud currently exists—by removing the ability of members of Congress to challenge election results from individual states. The current proposals would certainly raise the bar for such challenges in the hope of deterring the kind of insane bullshit Cruz and his compatriots tried in January 2021, but they would not be stripped of the ability to challenge. More to the point, though, why would McConnell support a bill that allowed Democrats to fraud their way to victory? Why would every single one of Cruz's Republican colleagues on the committee? Are they simply misinformed about the bill's potential to unleash a massive wave of fraud, a phenomenon that Republicans fabricated wholesale in 2020 while their leader actively tried to steal the election he lost?

To put the icing on the cake, Cruz cited the 1876 election and a commission established in its aftermath to examine various disputes around the result, including voter fraud claims. He left out that the election was likely marred by disenfranchisement of Black Republican voters in the South, along with political violence, and that the matter was ultimately settled by a purely political deal—the Compromise of 1877—that handed the presidency to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in exchange for the removal of federal troops from the South, effectively ending Reconstruction and paving the way for Jim Crow. Since the enduring subtext of Trump's post-election campaign was to throw out the votes of people in Detroit, Atlanta, Milwaukee, and other cities on the basis that Black votes for Joe Biden were inherently fraudulent, this is actually a decent parallel. Thanks, Ted!

Looking to the future, though, the intentions of this nasally menace are clear. Cruz wants to be Wacko di tutti Wacki heading into the 2024 Republican presidential primary, and Govs. Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis have already staked out the militantly anti-immigration lane. Maybe Cruz thinks there's an opening in the election fraud lane, though DeSantis is squatting there, too? What a joy this will all be in a year or so.

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