Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) hammered Vanita Gupta on the Senate Floor Thursday as one of the most “hard left partisan” radicals President Joe Biden has nominated.
Cruz on Thursday delivered his floor speech to urge his Senate colleagues to vote against Vanita Gupta’s nomination for associate attorney general. Cruz said he has great concerns over the nominee due to her history of being radical. Cruz went as far as to say there is no doubt Gupta is a “hard left partisan radical.”
Cruz said the Senate judiciary committee is gridlocked over Gupta. On Thursday, the committee was “set to vote on discharging Vanita Gupta’s nomination out of the judiciary committee because Ms. Gupta could not garner a majority vote in the committee on moving her nomination forward to the full Senate,” he explained.
“This nominee’s record is that of an extreme partisan ideologue,” Cruz said, adding, he wants to make clear to the American people, everyone knows she is not a moderate and not part of the mainstream. On the other hand, Cruz said Gupta is “an extreme political activist that the Democrats want to be the number three lawyer at the Department of Justice.”
Cruz said last month after Gupta testified in front of the Judiciary Committee, “she consistently dodged questions” and would not say whether or not she supported important issues like having any type of restrictions on abortion, “wouldn’t answer no on partial-birth abortion,” or anything.
The Texas Republican explained when he asked about the second amendment, Gupta would not give her thoughts on a landmark decision upholding the individual right to keep and bear arms. Cruz said she refused to answer if the Heller decision was “rightly decided.”
Cruz continued to show examples of Gupta and the Democrat Party’s extreme behavior over the years:
For years, she has demonstrated a persistent hostility to religious liberty, such as when she defended the Obama administration’s targeting and persecution of the Little Sisters of the Poor. Not too long ago, religious liberty was a bipartisan commitment in this body. The Religious Freedom Restoration Act was introduced by then-Representative Chuck Schumer, now the Senate majority leader. It passed the House unanimously. It passed the Senate 93 to three and was signed into law by Democratic President Bill Clinton. Sadly, today’s Democrat Party has abandoned religious liberty. That is no longer a commitment. Instead, today’s Democratic Party embraces extreme ideas like the Equality Act, which has just come out of the House of Representatives, a radical piece of legislation that, among other things, explicitly repeals major parts of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act — designed to take away your religious liberty. Ms. Gupta has been a vocal defender of the misnamed Equality Act. She lobbied for its passage, a fact that she didn’t disclose to the committee initially when she was before the Judiciary Committee. I asked if she agreed with the provisions in the Equality Act that take away religious liberty protections from Americans. Again, Ms. Gupta refused to answer that question too.
Cruz continued to say that Gupta has even demonstrated radical behavior in school choice. He added that when Gupta served in the Department of Justice under the Obama administration, “she helped intervene in a case trying to kill a Louisiana school choice program.”
He continued:
Even though many of the African-American parents in Louisiana strongly supported and desperately needed that program, the federal court involved in this case even reprimanded the Department of Justice under her leadership for ineffectively lawyering in this case. At the judiciary hearing of Ms. Gupta last month, I asked if she regretted using the Department of Justice to fight against the school choice program that was providing hope and opportunity to low-income minority kids in Louisiana. Again, she refused to provide a straightforward answer.
When Cruz started to talk about her ideas of policing, he said this is where Gupta is the most radical. He went on to say, last year, Gupta submitted written filings to the Senate to encourage Congress to “reexamine federal spending priorities and shrink the footprint of the police and criminal legal system in this country.”
Cruz explained that Gupta also encouraged “reallocating resources.” He said, “some people call it defunding the police, other people call it divest, invest, but whatever you call it, if you care about mass incarceration, you have to care about skewed funding priorities,” when describing another one of her writings.
Cruz wanted to emphasize that “these weren’t Ms. Gupta’s college writings. These weren’t scribblings on a post-it that she made somewhere.” He wanted to make clear everyone knows, “these statements were from last year, submitted to the United States Senate and on their face and unequivocally advocate for defunding the police.”
“There’s no question on her record that Ms. Gupta is a hard left partisan radical whose beliefs don’t align with the majority of the American people,” Cruz said.
“Unfortunately, the Democratic Party has changed. The Democratic Party today is radicalized,” Cruz stated.
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