Ted Cruz Too Smart For Real Senate Rules, Prefers The Ones He Made Up

Let us never,everforget that Sen. Ted Cruz is smarter than all of us put together. He was a member of the Constitutional Corroborators when he was just a wee lad in Texas, reciting the Constitution -- from memory! -- at civic centers, and singing the praises of the free market, glory hallelujah. Also, he was a master debaterat Princeton, and by the time he arrived at Harvard Law School, he was so convinced of his own intellectual superiority that he would not even lower himself to study with any of his fellow students who'd attended "minor ivies." 

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Despite the ginormous thought organ in his head, Cruz has a nasty habit of getting himself all confused about the law, and the Constitution, and how the Senate (of which he is still ostensibly a member) works, and other tricky stuff they apparently do not teach at Harvard Law School:

Texas Sen. Ted Cruz says that one of the reasons why he missed Attorney General Loretta Lynch's confirmation vote last week was because "absence is the equivalent to a 'no' vote."

"I voted twice against Loretta Lynch being confirmed," Cruz told reporters on Thursday. "There was no significance to the final vote, and I had a scheduling conflict."

The scheduling conflict that kept Cruz from casting a vote against now (finally) Attorney General Loretta Lynch -- even though he was one of her fiercest opponents and said her confirmation would be a "travesty" -- was a fundraiser for his presidential campaign. He has held his Senate seat for all of two years, but being a senator is justso2013, and he's got more important things to do now, like spend all his time pretending he's going to be president.

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Cruz, who was the only senator to skip the Lynch confirmation vote, claims the "Senate rules" record his lack of voting as a "no" vote. Let us see if he is correct, by reviewing the roll call on that vote:

Huh. There are all the no votes, and Cruz's name is not among them because it's in its own "Not Voting" category. Weird! Cruz insists, though, that his earlier cloture votes are the same thing as voting "no" on Lynch's confirmation. Is it, though? Is it really? (No, it is not.)

Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn, R-TX, who also voted for cloture but against Lynch's nomination, tweeted Saturday, "FYI: Cloture ends debate only. It does not confirm a nominee. Otherwise a subsequent vote on whether to confirm a nominee is meaningless."

Cornyn later told reporters that the tweet "wasn't responding to anybody in particular, but just to clear the air and state the fact."

"I know everybody wants me and Sen. Cruz in a public fight, and I'm not going to take the bait," Cornyn said. "But I stand by what I tweeted, it's true. Sometimes it's important not to just acquiesce when people say things that are misleading, but to actually correct, which is what I was trying to do."

But Cornyn did not receive his undergraduate or law degrees at any major ivies, so he obviously has no idea how things really work in the Senate. And who is he to question Ted Cruz's reading of the Constitution and the Senate rules and everything else in the universe on which he is an expert? After all, this is the guy who would try to win debates about the federal deficit by crying, "How dare you insult my father!" Only a fool would dare question a genius like that.

[ NBC News ]