Ted Cruz Has Some Helpful Ideas For Obama's SOTU Speech

Senator Ted Cruz is full of great ideas for the president to use in his State of the Union speech, Tuesday. Although the probability of Obama actually taking his advice is approximately 0% – you have to admire Cruz for trying.

There are five specific questions dealing with the IRS, NSA and Benghazi scandals, ObamaCare, and jobs, that Cruz would like the president to answer:

1. Will the President allow the Department of Justice to appoint a special prosecutor to fully investigate the IRS’s illegal targeting of conservatives? The President should be eager to prove he has clean hands on this issue. He professed to be angry and outraged by the IRS abuse. Will he pledge to stop new IRS rules that restrict the free speech of non-profit groups?

2. Will the President act to ensure that the privacy of law-abiding citizens is protected from unjustifiable violations by arms of the federal government such as the NSA, Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Internal Revenue Service, and Department of Health and Human Services?

3. Will the President recognize that his economic policies have failed to create the millions of jobs that he promised and have, instead, reduced the labor force participation rate to its lowest level in decades? Will he commit to commonsense, job-creating policies such as the immediate authorization of the Keystone Pipeline, a moratorium on new regulations, and fundamental tax reform for every American?

4. Will the President call on Congress to form a Joint Select Committee to finally discover the truth of why four Americans perished in a preventable terrorist attack in Benghazi 16 months ago?

5. Will the President finally recognize that it was a mistake to ram through Obamacare on a party-line vote and that it is — right now — hurting millions of Americans? Will he take real responsibility for misleading the American people when he falsely promised “if you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan” and “if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor”? Will he acknowledge that he doesn’t have the power to unilaterally rewrite the health law for powerful favored interests such as big business and Congress? And will he finally work with Congress to repeal Obamacare and start over, adopting instead reforms that will make healthcare more personal, portable, and affordable?

Today, Cruz issued a press release calling again on the president to form a Joint Select Committee on Benghazi.

Last week, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) released its declassified review of the attacks on Benghazi. This bi-partisan effort not only concluded that these attacks were preventable, but also that:

There was ample warning a terrorist attack in Benghazi was imminent

The State Department should have increased security

The Intelligence Community did not do due-diligence tracking open-source terrorist activity on social media

There were no U.S. military resources positioned for rapid response to this known terrorist hot-spot on the anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks

There was no basis for the claim there was a protest outside the Mission in Benghazi

The Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, provided flawed and incomplete information to Congress during its review of the Benghazi attacks

Although the SSCI report pieces important information together, it still does not explain why any of this happened. Just over a year ago Secretary Clinton demanded to know “What difference, at this point, does it make” to find out what really happened at Benghazi?

But with all due respect to Secretary Clinton, we still do not know why the Obama administration took no steps to protect our people, why they took no steps to prevent the attacks, why they claimed an Internet video was to blame, why they insist there is no al Qaida connection to the attacks, why no one from our government has been held responsible for these failures, and why no terrorist has been punished for the attacks. This information makes a difference.

On CBS’s “Face the Nation”, Sunday, Cruz declared that Obama should use the State of the Union to apologize for ObamaCare. The comments came after Bob Schieffer attempted to put Cruz on the defensive for causing the government shutdown. Not backing down, not apologizing, Cruz instead went on the offensive – and hit it out of the park.

BOB SCHIEFFER: Well, of course what he would say is that he is creating more jobs, that unemployment is going down and on and on. But we’ll leave that for the Democrats to talk about. Lemme ask you this. You became a celebrity when you led the drive to shut down the government over Obamacare. But afterwards, your fellow Republicans said you’d led them over a cliff. Can you conceive of any situation in which you would do that again, try to shut down the government in exchange or in demand for some action by the president?

SEN. TED CRUZ: Well, Bob, with all due respect, I don’t agree with the premise of your question. Throughout the government shutdown, I opposed a government shutdown. I said we shouldn’t shut down the government. I think it was a mistake that President Obama and the Democrats shut the government down this fall.

The reason they did so is that President Obama dug in and said he wouldn’t compromise and he wouldn’t negotiate. In fact, I went to one of the most surreal meetings I’ve ever been at, where President Obama invited all the senate Republicans to go up to the White House. He sat us in a room. This is in the middle of the shutdown.

And he said, “I invited you here to tell you I will not negotiate. I will not compromise on anything.” That’s why we had a shutdown. That was a mistake. But, you know, in terms of whether we should’ve stood and fought on Obamacare, I think the proof is in the pudding. Millions of people across the country have seen now why we were standing and fighting, because Obamacare’s a disaster.

And, you know, for the State of the Union, one of the things President Obama really oughta do is look in the TV camera and say to the over five million Americans all across this country who’ve had their health insurance canceled because of Obamacare, to look in the camera and say, “I’m sorry. I told you if you like your health insurance plan, you can keep it.

“I told you if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor. And that wasn’t true. I’m sorry.” But then, Bob, here’s the real kicker. If you’re really sorry, you don’t just say you’re sorry. You actually do something to fix the problem. The pattern we’ve seen over and over again with this president is he says–

BOB SCHIEFFER: All–

SEN. TED CRUZ: –he’s sorry and he expresses outrage but then he doesn’t fix the problem. He keeps doing it over and over again.

Note to Republican leaders – that is how you field questions about the government shutdown. In a sane world, the party that refused to negotiate and was behind the spiteful shutdown theater would be the one suffering political consequences. Not the party that was trying to save the nation from an oncoming trainwreck. Too many Republicans seem like they’d rather let the Democrat media complex set the narrative for them, than push back with their own counter-narrative.