Ted Cruz Plans To Restore Confidence in the Election System by Lending Credence to the Wild Fraud Claims of a ‘Pathological Liar’

Sen. Ted Cruz (R–Texas) and 10 other Republican senators say they are trying to restore faith in the integrity of the U.S. electoral system. They are doing that by joining the doomed effort to reject electoral votes for Joe Biden when Congress officially tallies the results on Wednesday, based on the unsubstantiated claims of a president Cruz himself has described as “a pathological liar” who “doesn’t know the difference between truth and lies.”

Like Sen. Josh Hawley (R–Mo.), who on Wednesday became the first senator to back electoral-vote objections, Cruz and his allies do not explicitly endorse the claim that Biden stole the election, which the Trump campaign and its supporters have failed to support with credible evidence in the scores of lawsuits they have filed since the election. But in a joint statement issued yesterday, Cruz et al. cite the doubts sown by the president’s reckless allegations as a reason to challenge the results from “disputed states.” In a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted last month, they note, 39 percent of respondents, including 67 percent of Republicans and 17 percent of Democrats, said they were concerned that the election was “rigged.”

Was the election actually rigged? Cruz et al., unlike their allies in the House, won’t hazard an opinion.

“Some Members of Congress disagree with that assessment, as do many members of the media,” the 11 senators note. “Whether or not our elected officials or journalists believe it, that deep distrust of our democratic processes will not magically disappear. It should concern us all. And it poses an ongoing threat to the legitimacy of any subsequent administrations.”

Rather than evaluate the merits of Trump’s fraud claims, which have made no headway in state or federal courts, the senators say the fact that many people believe them is reason enough for Congress to “immediately appoint an Electoral Commission, with full investigatory and fact-finding authority, to conduct an emergency 10-day audit of the election returns in the disputed states.” They plan to “reject the electors from disputed states as not ‘regularly given’ and ‘lawfully certified’ (the statutory requisite), unless and until that emergency 10-day audit is completed.”

Do Cruz et al. have any specific reason to believe the audits and recounts that states have conducted since the election, all of which validated Biden’s victory, were deficient? They don’t say. Yet they imply that the certification of electoral votes in “disputed states” cannot be trusted, based on allegations by the same man Cruz has said lies almost every time he opens his mouth.

Despite his history of questioning Trump’s honesty, Cruz was eager to represent the Trump campaign in two lawsuits that sought to prevent Biden from taking office.  “Ideally, the courts would have heard evidence and resolved these claims of serious election fraud,” he and the other senators say. “Twice, the Supreme Court had the opportunity to do so; twice, the Court declined.”

Yet neither of those lawsuits, which focused on election procedures in swing states, alleged actual fraud. In that respect, they resembled most of the Trump campaign’s post-election lawsuits. Again and again, the claims Trump’s lawyers made in court fell far short of the allegations they have made in press conferences and TV appearances. Seeking to intervene in one of the cases the Supreme Court declined to hear, Trump conceded that he could not back up the claims of massive fraud he has been pushing for two months.

“Despite the chaos of election night and the days which followed, the media has consistently proclaimed that no widespread voter fraud has been proven,” Trump lawyer John Eastman wrote. “But this observation misses the point. The constitutional issue is not whether voters committed fraud but whether state officials violated the law by systematically loosening the measures for ballot integrity so that fraud becomes undetectable.”

That position contradicts eve