Texas Republican Senator Ted Cruz was caught on camera tweeting about his love of Diet Dr. Pepper while Minnesota Democratic Senator Amy Klobuchar was tearing him a new soda-hole over his attempt to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election.
At a Senate Rules Committee hearing on Tuesday, Sen. Cruz railed against S. 1, the For the People Act, and repeatedly made false claims that committee chair Klobuchar stepped in to correct.
During one such exchange, Sen. Klobuchar lit into Cruz over his participation in the effort to overturn the 2020 election as insurrectionists descended on the Capitol.
Klobuchar first cited the peaceful and successful electoral certification that then-Vice President Biden presided over in 2017, then told Cruz “Then let’s fast forward to the day of the insurrection, January 6th, when in fact you, Senator Cruz — not not all of your college here today, you — were contesting the electoral college. You were leading, one of the leaders, on the effort to say that the election results were not correct.”
“And so you wonder why we want to make sure that people have the right to vote, well it’s because of this kind of rhetoric and this kind of behavior and an insurrection of the Capitol and a former president that is still maintaining that he somehow won the election when we all know it was not true. And so that’s why when you ask
But as Klobuchar spoke, Cruz could be seen fiddling with his phone in a clip that wound up going viral.
And shortly thereafter, The Recount checked Cruz’s Twitter feed at the time he was ignoring his colleague, and found that Cruz was tweeting about his affinity for Diet Dr. Pepper at that exact moment.
The Recount Twitter account made a note of the tweet.
Cruz followed up by falsely claiming that Sen. Klobuchar was reading a statement while he was tweeting.
Cruz’s performance drew fierce reaction from critics with verified accounts, which appears to have been the point if Cruz’s tweets are any indication.
There were also some dissenters among the detractors:
Watch the clip above via C-Span.