Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) roasted House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) on the Senate floor Thursday, saying she is drunk on power for reinstating the mask mandate.
“Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts, absolutely. Great men are almost exclusively bad men, even where they exercise influence and not authority,” Cruz receded from a series of letters to Bishop Craig from Lord Acton. The Texan explained that “those words were true in 1887, and they’re true today.”
“Be one understand how power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Look no further than the other chamber in the United States Capitol. Speaker Nancy Pelosi is drunk on power,” Cruz declared.
“The orders that Speaker Pelosi is issuing are abusive and unprecedented,” talking about Pelosi’s threats to members of Congress, who he mentioned are “elected by the people,” and explained how the Speaker is trying to fine members who walk onto the House floor without a mask.
“Who the hell is she to be fining members of the House?” Cruz asked, noting that she did not just disrespect the Constitution and the “democratic system that elects leaders,” but she disrespected the people who work in the Capitol.
“That is an absolute and complete abuse of power. She has no authority to disrespect the men and women who work here to threaten you with physical harm to threaten you with imprisonment,” he said. Pelosi is only doing this for political theater, Cruz continued:
As president, we’re coming through a very difficult year and a half our nation in the world has endured a pandemic. We have collectively taken extraordinary steps to defeat this pandemic, and we are coming out on the other side. We saw our nation we saw the private sector come together with remarkable inventiveness and produce vaccines in record times. And we have seen hundreds of millions of people getting those vaccines. We are in the process of beating this pandemic.
Not too long ago, the CDC recognized what was obvious then it is obvious now. Vaccines work. And if you’re vaccinated. You don’t need to wear a mask. The CDC issued that ruling, and I remember that day well.
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I had been vaccinated a couple of months before then, and after allowing the time for the vaccine to become effective, I decided I was going to stop wearing a mask. Why is that? Because vaccines work because I believe in science. So I stopped wearing a mask. And there were a handful of senators in the senate floor who had been vaccinated who stopped wearing masks.
“What Speaker Pelosi is doing is wrong. What the CDC is doing, corrupting science with politics is wrong, and it’s time for the United States Senate in the United States House, to stand on the side of the American people to stand on the side of freedom,” Cruz declared at the end of his speech, noting, it is an individual’s choice “to go to work, to go to school, to go to church, to live your life. Free of Lord Acton’s abuse of absolute power.”
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