WATCH: Ted Cruz Slams Democrats Over Their ‘Priorities’ About ‘Staying in Power’
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) slammed Democrats on Wednesday over what he said are their “priorities” in their quest for “staying in power.”
“The hearings that Democrats decide to hold demonstrate their priorities, what they care about,” said Cruz during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing about the proposed John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
“But you know what? There’s something that they’ve had more hearings about than amnesty and that is the federal takeover of election law and the Democratic power grab,” he added. “There is nothing that is a higher priority for Democrats than staying in power. The Corrupt Politicians Act was so brazenly political, it was such a naked power grab that Democrats have abandoned it when they realized they couldn’t defend it with a straight face. So this is their fallback provision.”
Cruz went on to slam the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, specifically two provisions of it that he called “Department of Justice preclearance for everyone Democrats don’t like” and “Department of Justice preclearance for everything Democrats don’t like.”
Cruz cited that the bill would require state and local governments to submit to the DOJ, as he put it, “certain voting changes” such as Voter ID or preventing ballot harvesting. He warned the DOJ would reject those changes “because they’ve been explicit they oppose all those laws.”
As an example to his argument, Cruz provided a hypothetical where Democratic states such as California “have to submit every law or policy affecting religious liberty or affecting firearms to a brand new division” of the DOJ, “staffed almost entirely by activists who’ve been fighting in favor of religious liberty and in favor of the Second Amendment their entire time. And if these activists objected to the California or New York law, then the states couldn’t implement them.”
“That would be absurd,” he added. “That’s what the Democrats have done” with the voting rights act.
Cruz called the bill “an assault on the right to vote,” adding that it’s “a power grab, it’s cynical and it’s wrong.”
Watch above, via CSPAN.
