Justin's Political Corner

This morning, the National Review broke the news that tea party Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is considering a presidential run, a scoop that should surprise no one who’s paid attention to his short Senate career. As Jonathan Bernstein explains, Cruz has spent his few months in the Senate alienating his colleagues by constantly trying to distinguish himself as the more-conservative-than-thou alternative to “establishment” Republicans. Such behavior makes no sense if Cruz is interested in building the coalitions necessary to legislate, but it makes perfect sense if he has his eyes set on winning a tea-soaked GOP primary in 2016.

 Here are five examples of such theories that Cruz actually believes in:

• George Soros leads a global conspiracy to abolish the game of golf. In a January 2012 article published on Cruz’s senate campaign website, the future senator argues that a twenty year-old non-binding United Nations resolution signed by 178 nations including the United States under President George H.W. Bush, is actually a nefarious plot to “abolish ‘unsustainable’ environments, including golf courses, grazing pastures, and paved roads.” Cruz attributes this plot to a common tea party boogieman — “[t]he originator of this grand scheme is George Soros, who candidly supports socialism and believes that global development must progress through eliminating national sovereignty and private property.”
• Communists infiltrated Harvard Law School. Almost three years ago, Cruz gave a speech to the tea party group Americans for Prosperity in which he claimed that revolutionary communists were a major presence on Harvard’s law faculty. According to Cruz, “There were fewer declared Republicans in the faculty when we were there than Communists! There was one Republican. But there were twelve who would say they were Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.” Cruz’s claims came as a big surprise to Harvard Law Professor Charles Fried, a Republican who served as President Reagan’s solicitor general, who says that “I would be surprised if there were any members of the faculty who ‘believed in the Communists overthrowing the U.S. government.’”
• Islamic law threatens the United States. Echoing a common fear among very conservative politicians that Sharia law is somehow creeping into American life, Cruz told a senate candidate’s forum last year that “Sharia law is an enormous problem” in the United States. In reality, there are barely any examples of Islamic or Sharia law even being mentioned in American legal proceedings, and when it is mentioned it is typically because a contract, will or other document drafted by a private citizen invokes Sharia law, not because the court wishes to replace American law with something else.
• Obama wants the immigration bill to fail so he can campaign on it in 2016. Cruz claims that “the reason that the White House is insisting on a path to citizenship” in the immigration bill making its way through Congress “is because the White House knows that insisting on that is very likely to scuttle the bill” giving Obama an issue to campaign on in 2014 and 2016. In reality, a path to citizenship was a key prong of the immigration bill President Bush supported in 2007. It’s also a major prong of the Gang of Eight bill — agang which includes Republican Sens. John McCain (R-AZ), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Lindsay Graham (R-SC) and Jeff Flake (R-AZ). So if the path to citizenship is actually an Obama plot to give himself a campaign issue, Obama has some unexpected co-conspirators in this scheme.
• George W. Bush led an assault on Texas’ “sovereignty.” Cruz’s first campaign ad touted his victory in a Supreme Court case permitting the state of Texas to execute a Mexican national, despite the fact that Texas violated America’s treaty obligations by not permitting this Mexican citizen “to request assistance from the consul of his own state.” President Bush objected to Texas’s effort to flout a treaty that even North Korea had honored when it detained two American journalists for five months in 2009. Cruz dismissed Bush’s objections as an intrusion on “the sovereignty of the States.”

If elected to the White House, Cruz is unlikely to step back from his penchant for Glenn Beck-style conspiracies.

h/t: Ian Millhiser at Think Progress Justice

WASHINGTON — Sen. Ted Cruz says that he is expecting a vote Wednesday on his amendment to defund Obamacare until economic growth is restored, adding that he is willing to risk a government shutdown if Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and President Barack Obama stand in the way.

In a joint press conference Wednesday morning with Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah), James Inhofe (R-Okla.) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Cruz urged members of Congress to include his Restore Growth First amendment in the continuing resolution to fund the government, telling his Republican colleagues in both chambers to join him in an “important stand for principle.” Cruz then challenged Democrats to support the measure in order to avert a possible government shutdown.

“I think it’s the right position for Republicans to be taking,” Cruz said. “And I think it would be exactly the right decision to then send it back to Harry Reid and President Obama and ask if Harry Reid and President Obama are willing to try to shut the government down in order to insist that Obamacare be fully funded now even though it could well push us into a recession.”

Cruz — who has previously introduced legislation to fully repeal Obamacare — added, “In my view, Obamacare should be repealed in its entirety. But at a minimum, Obamacare should not be implemented at a time when the economy is grasping [sic] for breath.”

Cruz first raised the prospect of a government shutdown on Monday, when he told conservative radio host Laura Ingraham that, in order to delay Obamacare funding, “you’ve got to be willing to risk President Obama shutting down the government if he won’t go along with it.”

Cruz readily acknowledged Wednesday that his amendment is unlikely to pass the Senate, which is controlled by Democrats. But he argued that since there is a “very good chance” the continuing resolution will be amended in the Senate and sent back to the House, he would be “very encouraged” if the House included his amendment to defund the president’s health care plan.

The House, however, declined to include an amendment to defund Obamacare when it passed a continuing resolution last Wednesday, despite more than two dozen Republicans pushing for such a provision.

On Tuesday, Rep. Jim Bridenstine (R-Okla.) also floated the idea of a possible government shutdown in order to force Democrats to agree to temporarily defund Obamacare, telling conservative radio pundit Mike Huckabee that “if they want to fund the government, they’ve got to defund Obamacare.”

Since the health care law’s passage in 2010, congressional Republicans have tried to repeal it more than 30 times.

h/t: Huffington Post

While the White House, governors, Congress and other public officials grapple with policy responses to last month’s mass shooting at a Connecticut elementary school, many Americans wonder whether the massacre of young children will provide momentum for more effective laws that previous killing sprees – even one that gravely wounded a member of Congress – have not. 

Some assume, wrongly, that nothing can be done.  Politicians’ fear of the $200+ million National Rifle Association (NRA) is generally cited as the reason for weak gun laws that undermine law enforcement and put citizens at higher risk from gun crimes.  The power of the NRA to determine the outcome of elections may well be more myth than reality, but even the perception of such power can give the group tremendous political muscle, along with its aggressive lobbying and strong-arm political tactics.

The NRA is not alone in attempting to prevent effective regulation of guns and promoting reckless policies that leave Americans vulnerable to crime.  Its efforts are supported by the same kind of coalition that undermines the nation’s ability to solve a wide range of problems.  Corporations, right-wing ideologues, and Religious Right leaders work together to misinform Americans, generate unfounded fears, and prevent passage of broadly supported solutions.

Understanding the extremism and dishonesty at the heart of right-wing obstructionism is crucial to overcoming it.  

Who’s Extreme?

Opponents of stronger gun laws portray any effort to regulate the sale of even military-style weapons as radical assaults on American freedom.  For instance, Matt Barber of the Liberty Counsel, a Religious Right legal group, called President Obama a “slime ball,” claiming falsely that Obama used his remarks at a memorial service for the Connecticut shooting victims to push “radical” gun control and saying of Obama, “His extremism knows no lows.”

But it is Barber and NRA officials who are staking out an extreme position. They emphatically do not speak for the American people.  More strikingly, the NRA leadership and its allies do not speak for the group’s own members.  Huge majorities of NRA members support sensible policies that the group opposes. For example, 82 percent of the public, and 74 percent of NRA members, support requiring a criminal background check of anyone purchasing a gun.  NRA leaders strongly oppose requiring background checks for gun sales.  And a recent poll taken after the Newtown shooting found that a majority of people who live in gun-owning households support a ban on high-capacity ammunition magazines.

At the urging of NRA officials, Congress has even passed laws that undermine law enforcement officials’ ability to fight gun crimes, forcing the Justice Department to destroy within 24 hours records about the buyer in approved purchases and making it harder for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to track sales of certain guns used in crimes.  How do anti-gun-regulation activists prevent action in the face of broad public support?  They deploy a range of strategies and tactics that right-wing activists use on a variety of issues:

Denying and Masking Reality

On issues from gay rights to climate change, right-wing activists stick stubbornly to their ideology even when it is clearly controverted by scientific consensus and other reality.  On gun violence, NRA officials  and their allies refuse to acknowledge that the availability of assault weapons and high-volume ammunition clips, or the lack of background checks for private sales of guns, are problems that make it easier for a shooter to kill more innocent people quickly.  They ignore evidence that stronger gun laws can and do reduce gun crimes. According to an October 2012 report from the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, “When states expand firearm prohibitions to high-risk groups, and adopt comprehensive measures to prevent diversion of guns to prohibited persons, fewer guns are diverted to criminals, and there is less violence. ”

One way to mask reality is through rhetoric that distorts or hides the truth.  Tea Party leaders and their allies rallied opposition to federal health care reform by portraying “ObamaCare” in lurid end-of-freedom, America-destroying rhetoric. They were successful in building public opposition to the generic “ObamaCare” – even though there was strong majority support for most of the substantive elements of the plan.  By portraying advocates for stronger gun regulation as government thugs who want to take guns from hunters’ hands, NRA leaders and their allies have been able to generate some poll numbers indicating opposition to “gun control,” but the more relevant fact for policymakers is that huge majorities of Americans, and of NRA members themselves, back many of the most commonly discussed approaches to reducing gun violence.  Stronger efforts to keep dangerous guns out of the hands of dangerous people are simply not attacks on the right recognized by the Supreme Court under the Second Amendment of law-abiding citizens to have guns for hunting or self-defense.

Shifting Blame

The speech by the NRA’s Wayne LaPierre a week after the Connecticut shootings was a memorable display of blame shifting.  He attempted to cast blame for the killings on everyone but his own group’s resistance to stronger controls on assault weapons and the firearms or ammunition themselves.

Religious Right leaders and right-wing pundits played their usual parts in the spin. Religious broadcaster James Dobson said the shooting was God’s judgment for the country turning its back on scripture and on God.  Franklin Graham said much the same: “This is what happens when a society turns its back on God.”  Radio host Steve Deace blamed public schools for promoting a “culture of death” and teaching students “there is no God and thus no real purpose to their lives.”  American Family Association spokesperson Bryan Fischer said God wasn’t there to protect students because schools were not starting the day with prayer.  Newt Gingrich blamed “an anti-religious secular bureaucracy and secular judiciary seeking to drive God out of public life,” along with video games.  Culture warriors Ted Baehr and Tom Snyder wrote in Movieguide:

By removing God, the Bible, God’s Law, Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit from society, including the mass media and the schools, we are raising generations of people with no faith in God or Jesus and, hence, no moral conscience, and no self-control.  If so many people have no faith, no moral conscience and no self-control, then it’s no wonder our society is suffering from all these mass murders by evil lone gunmen.

Tea Party Nation blamed teachers’ unions, liberals, and an “over-bureaucratized society.”  The Oathkeepers, a Tea Party offshoot for military and law enforcement officials, argued that the federal government was “complicit in the deaths of these children, and in fact an accessory to their mass murder, by forcibly disarming (with the very real threat of prison) all the teachers, all the staff, and any parent who may have been on school property.”

The consequence of such blame-spreading is that it creates distractions from addressing the real problems.  One Religious Right leader appearing on American Family Radio called the shooting a “gracious” act of divine punishment designed to “bring us to our senses and bring us back to Him.” 

Hostility to Compromise

The absolute refusal to compromise – indeed, the vilification of the very idea of compromise – is at the heart of the right-wing movement and much of the modern Republican Party.  That has been the story of GOP obstructionism on tax policy, judicial nominations, and more.  Just as the Tea Party and its corporate backers have gone out of their way to punish Republicans they see as insufficiently “conservative” – even when it meant nominating extremists who could not win a general election – leaders of the NRA and other groups like the Gun Owners of America react with fierce hostility to talk of compromise.  Their political power comes largely from the fear they have created among elected leaders that the group will spend lavishly to punish even the tiniest dissent from its ideological dogma.  The NRA’s leaders loudly pulled out of current conversations convened by the White House, denouncing the effort to find policy solutions to gun violence as “demonizing” the Second Amendment, and they launched a “Stand and Fight” campaign even before the details of the White House proposals had been announced.  Rep. Steve Stockman from Texas even threatened to file articles of impeachment.

One way Religious Right leaders justify their opposition to compromise is claiming a biblical mandate for their favored policies, something Religious Right leaders do on issues like taxes as well as issues involving privacy and sexuality.  Discredited Religious Right “historian” David Barton calls the Second Amendment “the biblical right of self-defense” and says it requires that individual Americans have access to any weapon the federal government has.

Smearing Opponents

Just as Religious Right groups smear political opponents as hostile to religious liberty, anti-gun-regulation groups smear as enemies of liberty anyone who advocates for stronger oversight on the purchase of weapons capable of mass violence.  Even though polls show that NRA members believe support for the Second Amendment goes hand in hand with preventing gun crimes, the group’s leaders falsely equate any effort to strengthen gun laws to advance public safety with a desire to confiscate Americans’ handguns and hunting rifles.

Religious Right leaders are prone to make claims that only fellow believers are capable of moral action and decision making.  Snyder and Baehr, in their post-shooting column, wrote, “Without God, without faith and values, we are just soulless meat machines who can kill without mercy.”

Promoting Conspiracy Theories

The right-wing base of the Republican Party is fed a steady diet of conspiracy theories about liberals and other perceived enemies.  That’s why so many Republicans believe President Obama is a secret Muslim bent on the destruction of the US, or that he was not born in the United States. During the Obama administration, right-wing websites have circulated conspiracy theories about the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security administration stockpiling ammunition intended to be used against Americans and building concentration camps for conservatives.

National Rifle Association leaders claimed during the 2012 election that President Obama’s lack of action on gun issues during his first term was an elaborate ruse to mask his radical intentions to disarm gun owners.  Larry Pratt of the Gun Owners of America insisted that the federal health care reform law was meant to “take away your guns.”

Some went even further: Christian radio host Bradlee Dean, a close ally of Rep. Michele Bachmann, suggested that the killings at Sandy Hook Elementary School, like earlier murders at a theater in Aurora, Colorado, were actually orchestrated by the government to create a pretext to ban guns.

Extremist Interpretations of the Constitution

A Wyoming legislator has introduced legislation that would make it a felony to enforce a federal ban on assault weapons or high-capacity ammunition.  The idea that a state could imprison federal agents for enforcing a federal law may excite right-wing activists, but it doesn’t reflect a reality-based view of our constitutional system of government.  And that’s a widespread problem.  David Barton insists that the founding fathers’ view of the constitutional right to bear arms means that any weapon the government possesses must also be available to the population at large: “…whatever the government’s got, we’ve gotta have the same thing, because if they’ve got an AK-47 and come through and we’ve only got a BB gun on the inside, this is not a deterrent.  So the whole purpose of the Second Amendment is to make sure you have equal power with whatever comes against you illegally.”  If Barton is really saying that citizens have a Second Amendment right to anything that is in the U.S. military arsenal – chemical weapons, fully automated machine guns, bombs, and more – that is emphatically not a view endorsed by the Supreme Court.

Ted Cruz, a new U.S. senator from Texas elected with major support from Tea Party activists said recently that efforts to restrict the sales of assault weapons and ammunition are unconstitutional.  In fact, even the conservative Supreme Court has said clearly that regulating the sale of dangerous guns is not prohibited by the Second Amendment.  According to Justice Antonin Scalia, “the Second Amendment does not protect those weapons not typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes, such as short-barreled shotguns.”

Harnessing Corporate Money

Right-wing causes, including the Tea Party, anti-unionism, and anti-environmentalism, have benefitted from a flood of corporate money in the wake of Supreme Court decisions gutting the nation’s campaign finance laws.  In addition, the American Legislative Exchange Council, a right-wing group that acts as matchmaker between corporate interests and lawmakers eager to do their bidding, has produced literally hundreds of model bills that right-wing legislators have enacted into law – attacking unions and public education and otherwise supporting the predatory privatization of public assets and government services.  Among the model bills ALEC has previously promoted is the so-called “stand your ground” law originally adopted in Florida.  ALEC deemed it a national “model” law, and it was enacted in more than two dozen states.  The Florida law was cited initially to prevent the prosecution of the man who killed Trayvon Martin.

Some analysts believe the NRA has morphed from a grassroots group teaching marksmanship to a trade association for gun manufacturers – a “lobbying, merchandising and marketing machine.”  Business Week reported in January 2012 that more than 50 firearms-related companies had given at least $14.8 million to the group.  The NRA has boosted gun makers several ways: its rhetoric about gun confiscation has spurred binge buying by gun enthusiasts; it has pushed a federal law that limits liability against gunmakers as well as state laws that bar cities from suing gun manufacturers (in conjunction with ALEC); and the NRA’s legislative arm has also “helped ensure the end of the federal assault weapons ban” in 2004 (which the NRA and ALEC opposed in 1994).  Business Week quotes the former NRA President Sandy Froman claiming that it “saved the American gun industry from bankruptcy.”

Anything Goes

A hallmark of right-wing activism over the past four years has been a willingness to say and do anything to try to undermine the effectiveness of the Obama presidency and to try to prevent the president’s re-election (as well as his initial election).  Rhetorically, that has meant equating health care reform and other initiatives with tyranny.  In response to recent reports that some aspects of gun regulation could be strengthened by executive order, the right-wing Drudge Report posted photos of Hitler and Stalin. 

Before the 2012 election, NRA leaders portrayed President Obama as conspiring to abolish Americans’ Second Amendment rights.  But NRA efforts to bring down the Obama administration went well beyond political rhetoric and campaign spending.  The NRA leadership played a significant role in the failed effort by congressional Republicans to turn the ATF’s botched “Fast and Furious” operation into an administration-destroying scandal.  NRA officials even announced that the group would “score” a House vote on whether to hold Attorney General Eric Holder in contempt, getting votes from Republicans and some Democrats eager to preserve a 100-percent NRA rating.

Money, Power, and Perception

Back in August, Daniel Webster, co-director of the Center for Gun Policy and Research at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore said, “Democrats have decided, I think wrongly politically and morally, that it’s only an issue they can lose on.”  Indeed, even though the group’s recent political spending is heavily weighted toward Republicans, the lack of desire to cross the NRA’s lobbyists and activists is bipartisan.  In 2009, a Democratic Congress complied with demands for federal laws allowing people to bring guns onto Amtrak trains and into national parks; in 2010 the group demanded, and got, a special exemption from identifying its donors in the DISCLOSE Act under consideration.

h/t: People For The American Way

During Republican Chuck Hagel’s defense secretary confirmation hearing on Thursday, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) chose to use a large portion of his five minutes ofquestioning to play a YouTube video of Hagel in an Al Jazeera interview from 2009.

Hagel’s original statement at a Senate session held on July 31, 2006 described the conflict in Israel as “a sickening slaughter on both sides” that Hagel said “must end.” However, Cruz highlighted Hagel’s “sickening slaughter” remark and his agreement with a caller who referenced “war crimes.”

Hagel, a former senator from Nebraska, navigated questions from his own party regarding his record, including his stance on the defense budget, nuclear weapons and the Middle East. 

h/t: Huffington Post

Apparently every Democrat automatically despises the troops, even when those Democrats once volunteered to serve in the armed forces. It’s a trope Republicans have pulled out ever since the Nixon years. The Obama era—replete with drone strikes, Libyan intervention, and the death of Osama bin Laden—has robbed Republicans of a bit of their bluster. But on Saturday Ted Cruz, the newly elected U.S. Senator from Texas, breathed new life into the old smear when he tarred two highly decorated former veterans.

A quick refresher about the two men he claims somehow oppose the U.S. military. In 1966, secretary of state nominee John Kerry, while studying at Yale University, enlisted in the U.S. Navy. In 1968, at the peak of the conflict, he requested to serve in Vietnam. The U.S. government ultimately awarded Kerry three Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star, and a Silver Star for his service. Contra the despicable Swift Boat ads trotted out in the 2004 presidential campaign, Kerry is indisputably a war hero.

In 1967, Chuck Hagel, the secretary of defense nominee, was called before the draft board and volunteered to serve in the U.S. Army. Hagel saw combat in  both Vietnam and Cambodia. Along with the shrapnel from a mine explosion still lodged in his chest, Hagel walked away from the war with two Purple Hearts and a host of other commendations.

The two men would later serve together in the U.S. Senate—Kerry as a Democrat, Hagel as a Republican. Neither voted consistently against the use of American forces abroad. Both, in fact, approved the resolution granting George W. Bush approval to pursue the foolish Iraq War. 

Yet for Ted Cruz, who never served in the military, both Kerry and Hagel are dangerous peaceniks who cannot be trusted. Cruz, who has quickly earned a reputation in Washington for serving up Michelle Bachmann-style red meat to the right-wing crowd, didn’t elaborate on his statement on stage and ducked out of the conference without fielding questions from the media. But it’s simple to see where his objection lies: President Obama nominated Kerry and Hagel. If a Democratic president has nominated you, you must loathe the military. And if you’re just another chicken-hawk Republican, you must love it more.

h/t: The American Prospect

So, Ted Cruz won the runoff in the Texas senate race.

Congratulations to him and to the Tea Party for putting another feather in their tri-corner hat. 
But here’s the thing: The ascendancy of Tea Party candidates like Cruz, while impressive, comes at a cost to the Republican Party: the loss of moderate Republicans who have been knocked off or have resigned. Other Republicans have simply moved farther to the right in order to placate the absurd demands of the Tea Party extremists.

Mitt Romney is the perfect example: He seemed like a moderate governor, but now he can’t wait to board the Tea Party Express to Crazytown. As Michael Tomasky said on my show last night, he’s such a pandering, weak-willed wimp that he’s basically outsourced his brain to the Tea Party and the Koch brothers who fund it. 

Whether it’s their Sharia law and birther conspiracies or their unwillingness to buck Grover Norquist’s no-tax pledge, the Tea Partiers have hijacked their party and carried it all the way to the right.

Don’t believe me? 

Think back to the Republican presidential debate when the moderator asked Republican candidates to raise their hands if they would reject a budget proposal that that offered ten dollars in spending cuts for every one dollar in tax increases. Ten to one! Ten bucks of what they want for one measly dollar of what’s actually fair. And how many of them rose their hands? Every. Single. One. 

From the 07.31.2012 edition of Current TV’s The War Room with Jennifer Granholm: h/t: Jennifer Granholm at Huffington Post

Today, Texas Republican primary voters selected Ted Cruz as their candidate to replace retiring U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX). Cruz, a former Solicitor General of Texas and law clerk to Chief Justice William Rehnquist, is among the nation’s most skilled Supreme Court advocates. Yet his considerable intellect is rivaled by his very poor judgment. Here are just five of the most revealing windows into Cruz’ Tea Party worldview:

1) Ted Cruz Believes George Soros Leads A United Nations Conspiracy To Eliminate Golf: In 1992, President George H.W. Bush joined the leaders of 177 other nations in endorsing a non-binding UN document known as Agenda 21. This twenty year-old document largely speaks at a very high level of generality about reducing poverty and building sustainable living environments. Nevertheless, Cruz published an article on his campaign website claiming that this non-binding document is actually a nefarious plot to “abolish ‘unsustainable’ environments, including golf courses, grazing pastures, and paved roads.” To top it off, Cruz lays the blame for this global anti-golf conspiracy at the feet of a well-known Tea Party boogieman — “The originator of this grand scheme is George Soros.”

2) Ted Cruz Wants To Gut Social Security: In an interview with the Texas Tribune Cruz labeled Social Security a “ponzi scheme” and outlined a three-step plan to gut this essential program. Cruz would raise the Social Security retirement age, cut future benefits, and implement a George W. Bush-style plan to privatize much of the program.

3) Ted Cruz Wants To Party Like It’s 1829: The Constitution provides that Acts of Congress “shall be the supreme law of the land,” and thus cannot be nullified by rogue state lawmakers. Cruz, however, co-authored an unconstitutional proposal claiming two or more states could simply ignore the Constitution’s command and nullify the Affordable Care Act so long as they work together.

4) Ted Cruz Is An Islamophobe: At a campaign event earlier this month, Cruz touted another of the Tea Party’s favorite conspiracy theories, claiming that “Sharia law is an enormous problem” in this country. Although it is common for far right politicians to claim that American law is somehow being replaced with Islamic law, these claims have absolutely no basis in reality.

5) Ted Cruz Campaigned On How He Helped Texas Kill A Mexican: Cruz’s very first campaign ad encouraged GOP primary voters to support him because he helped make it easier for Texas to kill an “illegal alien.”

h/t: Ian Millhiser at Think Progress Justice

Ted Cruz, the former Texas Solicitor General who gained the support of tea party groups in his campaign for U.S. Senate, has won the Republican primary runoff — virtually tantamount to election in deep-red Texas — in the race to succeed retiring GOP Sen. KayBailey Hutchison.

With 20 percent of precincts reporting, Cruz has 54 percent of the vote, compared to 46 percent for Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, who had the support of Gov. Rick Perry and much of the state GOP establishment.

h/t: TPM Livewire

Republican candidate and tea party darling Ted Cruz made an appearance at a campaign forum last night, and took the opportunity to advance some of the far-right’s favorite baseless conspiracy theories — including a claim that American law is in danger of being replaced by Islamic law:

“In response to questions from attendees, Cruz said he hoped to see U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder impeached and opposed the law that prohibits tax-exempt churches from endorsing candidates from the pulpit.

When asked about whether he viewed “Sharia Law” as a problem in the United States, Cruz said “Sharia law is an enormous problem.”

It’s not. It’s not even a small problem. Although it is common for politicians on the far right of America’s political spectrum to claim that courts are slowly replacing American law with Islamic law, these claims have no basis in reality. Few American courts have ever even mentioned Sharia or Islamic law, and those that have generally only do so in contracts or similar cases where a party before the court agreed to be bound by Sharia law.

Cruz and Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst are locked in a runoff election to be the Republican nominee to replace outgoing Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-TX).

h/t: Adam Peck at Think Progress Justice