Sen. Ted Cruz would like the people of Texas to know that he’s working hard for them in Washington, protecting America from socialism and Critical Racecar Theory, and what’s more, he’s proud to to become yet another Republican who takes credit for an infrastructure project he actually voted against.
Below you’ll see the distinguished Senator Unfortunate Confederate Beard at a Texas Tech Alumni event, explaining all the great work he did to expand Interstate 27, a north-south freeway whose expansion has been advocated for years by the “Ports to Plains” alliance. As the name suggests, the expansion will help goods get more efficiently from ports in Texas to destinations in Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Colorado, and thence to the rest of the Midwest via other expressways.
Hey, that sounds almost like the old NAFTA SUPERHIGHWAY that wingnuts fretted about for a decade or so and then forgot.
The project was included in March’s great big omnibus spending bill, which passed by a whopping 68-31 vote and funds the federal government for the rest of fiscal 2022, which … oh, my, ends at the end of this month, meaning that we’ll be looking at a whole new round of panic over government shutdowns at some point this fall. ‘Tis the season and all that.
In his remarks, Cruz played up what a great leader he’d been in securing an “incredible victory” for the people of Texas, but somehow he forgot to mention he was one of the 31 Republicans who voted against it. Here, just watch him fib!
This is a fight that I was proud to lead in the United States Senate, working closely with leaders here on the ground in the community all the way from Laredo, all the way up to North Dakota. […] And we were finally able to get it passed as part of an appropriation.
This bill, the Ports-to-Plains corridor, the construction alone is a $55 billion project. It’ll produce 178,000 construction jobs, many of which will be right here in the great state of Texas. It’ll produce over $17 billion for the Texas GDP. It’ll produce over 17,000 ongoing jobs from the trade and commerce.
Dang, that really does sound like quite a good project! You might think Cruz would have voted for the omnibus bill since it was so good.
In a press release last week, Cruz also bragged about the terrific “legislative victory” he’d accomplished, and how he’d “won a bipartisan victory when he worked to build a coalition of Republicans and Democrats to pass two major amendments” that resulted in the freeway route’s being expanded. Again, not a single mention of how Cruz actually voted against the legislation he had so lovingly crafted.
Now, to give the devil his tiny, irritatingly whiny due, Cruz noted, both in his speech and his press release, that he and a bunch of other senators from states along the route had all worked together to make sure the funding got into the bill before Cruz turned around and voted against it, letting Democrats and fewer than half of his Republican colleagues do the actual voting. So if he helped put the stuff into the bill and then voted against it, can he take credit for it? Seems a tad dishonest at least. Remember how John Kerry got slammed for years for voting for a bill before he voted against it?
We’ll stay on the lookout for even more fun with Republicans touting all the great stuff they opposed. Isn’t this a wonderful country?
[Heartland Signal / Nation / Image generated using DreamStudio Lite AI]
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