Ted Cruz is a champion debater, so when he thinks the best way to defend Jeff Sessions from Coretta Scott King’s charges of racism (as read by Elizabeth Warren) is to change the subject and attack Democrats as the real racists, you know he’s got nothing to work with on actually defending Sessions. Appearing on Fox News Wednesday morning, Cruz hit the wayback machine:
I’ve got to say by the way the charges she was making against Jeff Sessions are demonstrably false, they're slanderous, they’re ugly. It is one of the crutches. When the left doesn't have any other arguments they go and just accuse everyone of being a racist and it is an ugly, ugly part of the modern Democratic party. Jeff Sessions is an honorable, decent person. The charges that she was recounting, you know, Senate judiciary committee, we had extensive hearings, we heard from witnesses, people involved in these false charges.
And I'll point out, listen, the Democrats are the party of the Ku Klux Klan. You look at the most racist—the Dixiecrats, they were Democrats who imposed segregation, who imposed Jim Crow laws, who founded the Klan. ... Yet now the Democrats just accuse anyone they disagree with of being a racist. That was a false smear of Jeff Sessions and I think he will make an extraordinary attorney general. After eight years we deserve an attorney general who’ll be faithful to the law and faithful to the Constitution.
Cruz is aggressively, desperately changing the subject here. Elizabeth Warren read Coretta Scott King’s words, but he needs it to be about Warren. In 1986, both Democrats and Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee decided Jeff Sessions was too racist to be a federal judge, but it’s ugly, demonstrably false slander to say he has a race problem, let alone to read what Coretta Scott King had to say about him at that time.
When was the Klan founded? About 100 years ago. What has happened in the intervening 100 years? The Democratic Party has moved from being a heavily southern party backing segregation to being the party that fought segregation and promoted civil rights—the party of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson’s championing of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act—and as the Democratic Party has made that shift, it has lost the South. All those people in the South who used to be pro-segregation Democrats? They’re Republicans now. And there’s a reason African American voters have moved from being heavily Republican to overwhelmingly Democratic.
Dear Ted, It is 2017, not 1917 or 1947. The Democratic Party has changed. And so has the Republican Party—it’s moved backward on race and specifically on Jeff Sessions’ racism since 1986. Thirty years ago, Republicans could say that even though Sessions was one of their own, his views were unacceptable. Today, Republicans are fiercely defending him, to the extent of silencing Elizabeth Warren and trying to erase Coretta Scott King’s words from the record. Congratulations, Ted. Even as you pretend that the Democratic Party’s past is its present, you are trying to drag the entire nation backward.