Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) told Breitbart News he sees the first six weeks of Democrat President Joe Biden’s time in office as “boring but radical.”
Cruz’s comments came in a lengthy on-camera nearly 30-minute-long exclusive interview with Breitbart News on Thursday morning in his U.S. Senate office in Washington, DC. The interview, one of the more in-depth ones he has done since Biden took over the White House and Democrats swept into complete control in Washington, focused on the early days of the Biden presidency, key policy issues such as China and immigration, and Democrat and media hypocrisy as demonstrated by their handling of his recent trip to Cancun. Cruz also addressed the growing concerns of many Republicans that Texas may be slipping away from the GOP’s grasp, explaining new trends in politics where working-class voters are shifting towards Republicans but suburban women are moving towards Democrats.
Cruz in the interview first railed against Biden’s cabinet nominees, though his disapproval of them comes as little surprise as he has been one of the most dissenting senators during the confirmation process, voting against 11 of the 13 cabinet members so far confirmed.
He reiterated concerns he has conveyed during hearings, in which he grilled now-Ambassador to the U.N. Linda Thomas-Greenfield for a pro-China speech she gave at a Confucius Institute in 2019 and chastised now-Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo for refusing to commit to keeping Chinese companies, especially Huawei — which he describes as “basically an espionage agency” that “masquerades as a telecom company” — on the U.S. Entity List.
“Nominee after nominee in the Biden administration has really questionable records on China, and this seems to be part of a pattern, a very deliberate decision to pivot back towards China and to embrace the Chinese Communist government,” he said.
Cruz saved perhaps his harshest words for Xavier Becerra, the attorney general of California whom Biden has nominated to helm the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). While Cruz has pointed to soft-on-China commentary Becerra made in 1997, he zoned in on the attorney general’s lack of experience in the health sector.
“We’re in the middle of a global pandemic. Joe Biden likes to tell us that — daily,” Cruz started. “He’s nominated as the head of HHS someone who’s not a medical doctor, someone who has no healthcare experience whatsoever, someone who has no scientific background whatsoever, someone who has no experience with pharmaceuticals, no experiences with virology, no experiences with logistics. We’re in the middle of the largest vaccine deployment in American history, and Becerra doesn’t know a thing about logistics and actually moving hundreds of millions of vaccines across the country. He’s a trial lawyer. He has zero experience. If any Republican had nominated as secretary of HHS someone with no medical experience and no scientific experience, they’d have been laughed out of the room. It’s absurd. Why did Biden nominate him? Because Becerra is a leftist, partisan radical. As far as I can tell, his only experience on health care is suing the Little Sisters of the Poor.”
Becerra in 2017 sued the Trump administration after it granted an exemption to employers who did not want to provide copay-free insurance coverage for contraception on grounds of religious beliefs. The lawsuit inadvertently targeted the Catholic nun group, which intervened in the lawsuit after Becerra had initiated it. This lawsuit, Cruz contends, is the only health-related bullet point on Becerra’s resume.
“The Democrats like to say, ‘Follow the science. Listen to the science.’ Well how about have someone lead the largest cabinet agency domestically that knows something about science? It’s why I say the first six weeks they’ve been ‘boring but radical,’” he said.
Further evidence that the Biden administration’s approach to coronavirus lacks authentic concern for Americans’ health, Cruz said, lies in the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) management of those crossing the U.S.-Mexico border. As Breitbart News reported in February, Biden’s DHS has not been requiring all border crossers to undergo coronavirus testing.
“There are no rules,” Cruz said. “There’s no testing. There’s no standards. … He is willing to destroy your business. He is willing to destroy your job. He is willing to destroy your family. He is willing to tell you your kids can’t go to school, but when it comes to illegal immigrants, they’re releasing them; they’re not testing them.”
DHS is effectively signaling, “Olly olly oxen free, just come on in!” to prospective migrants, Cruz surmised.
The Texas Republican finds coronavirus to be “serious” and agrees with taking sensible precautions.
Last week, Gov. Greg Abbott lifted Texas’s mask mandate and increased the occupancy capacity for all businesses to 100 percent, a decision Cruz applauded when it was announced.
He explained to Breitbart News, “What doesn’t make sense is shutting down businesses, shutting down schools, destroying livelihoods, but you see the hypocrisy of the left when for example you have Democratic governors and Democratic mayors who are shutting down churches, but protests are fine. If you’re a leftist protest, you can have no mask. You can be screaming in someone’s face, and no virus will be transmitted. But if you go to church and you sing a hymn, clearly that is a threat to public health and must be stopped.”
“It’s evident to anyone looking at this that that’s not science. That’s ideology. That’s politics,” he said.
Cruz also said the Biden administration has found an ally in the media.
In February, Texas experienced catastrophic winter weather that resulted in mass utility outages, leading the Biden administration to declare a state of emergency and send federal aid to the state as it grappled with the impacts. Amid the disaster, Cruz was spotted boarding a plane to Cancun, Mexico.
“We saw Democrats and the media lose their minds. It was — if I had stolen nuclear secrets and delivered them to Beijing, I don’t think it would have gotten the coverage that the fact that I took my kids to the beach did,” Cruz observed, saying he only regrets the decision because it “gave ammunition to the knuckleheads.”
As a tidal wave of headlines hit the Internet, juxtaposing his tropical trip with his suffering state, defenders of Cruz compared the coverage of him to that of Cuomo. Donald Trump Jr. notably called the attention “fauxoutrage” and accused the media of being “totally silent” on Cuomo’s nursing home scandal, which came to a head in February after an aide admitted the Cuomo administration had suppressed data about the number of coronavirus-related deaths that had occurred in New York nursing homes.
Cruz himself said, “It was interesting, the contrast,” citing recently surfaced sexual misconduct allegations against Cuomo along with his “staggeringly stupid” nursing home policy. “You know, we’re watching the Andrew Cuomo regime crumble. … It really was striking,” he said.
Despite Biden’s victory over former President Donald Trump in November, Cruz assessed that America remains a “center-right country” and mainstream media entities are seeking to “gaslight” the American people over their beliefs, citing the conservative position on low taxes, low regulation, and job abundance. “The press hates that we believe that,” he said. “And so they’re trying to gaslight us.”
“They’re trying to lie to us,” Cruz added. “They’re trying to convince the conservative at home, ‘You’re the only one.’”
Write to Ashley Oliver at aoliver@breitbart.com.