In his amazing Liberty University speech where he announced that he's running for President of Jesus, Ted Cruz promised to repeal every single word of an onerous federal law that oppresses America and is designed to promote socialism. Twice. First, he promised to repeal every single word of Obamacare on his "first day in office." (Never mind that Sen. Cruz will actually spend January 20, 2017 watching someone else take the oath of office.) And then a little later in the speech, he also urged the well-scrubbed young people at Liberty University,

Instead of a federal government that seeks to dictate school curriculum through Common Core, imagine repealing every word of Common Core. (huge applause) Imagine embracing school choice as the civil rights issue of the next generation!

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And of course, every child will have a right to an excellent education, as long as nobody has to pay for anyone's children but their own.

Needless to say, Ted Cruz will have a pretty tough time repealing Common Core when he becomes President of the United States. For one thing, he's going to be awfully busy dodging all the flying pigs. For another, Common Core isn't a federal law.

Not that facts are much of an impediment to the Senator from Alberta, anyway -- remember how he killed the ACA all those times, first with the filibuster that wasn't, when he read Green Eggs And Ham to prove you should never try anything you think you won't like? Or the time he shut down the government to kill Obamacare again? Or his insistence that NASA needs to be studying faraway planets, not the climate of the one we live on, because how is that even science? Heck, if he can ignore the reality of global warming so easily, then pledging to repeal something that isn't even a law should be easy.

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If you want to bother with boring old reality, which is seldom applauded at Liberty University, Judd Legum explains over at ThinkProgress what Common Core actually is:

The Common Core State Standards Initiative, known as Common Core, was developed by the states — with input from teachers, education experts and business leaders — and has been voluntarily adopted by 43 states and the District Of Columbia. Notably, “the federal government played no role in creating the standards, nor did it require that states adopt them.”

OK, but now that they've been developed, the Federal Government is forcing teachers to teach Obama Math, aren't they, where "3 X 4 = 11" is a right answer if students feel good about themselves, aren't they? And it's all about the Feds writing one curriculum that will be imposed on all schools, right?

Common Core is not a curriculum but a set of standards regarding what students “should know and be able to do at each grade level in math and English language arts.” How kids get there is left to the schools and teachers.

Adopting Common Core was helpful to states seeking federal funding in 2009 under a program called “Race To The Top.” But many states that did not receive funding continue to implement Common Core.

So it's actually a set of guidelines for developing curricula that states can tailor to fit their schools, not an actual national curriculum. Of course, those are just liberal lies, because what Common Core really does is make your kids gay, force children to look at tiny cartoon genitals, and teach some freaky new kind of math that includes letters as well as numbers. There's also a popular confusion on the right between Common Core and the revised Advanced Placement U.S. History standards, even though Common Core only addresses math and English.

Oh, and there are actually legitimate reasons to be concerned about Common Core, like the possibility that it will just lead to more stupid and worthless standardized testing, but those aren't the things conservatives are freaking out about.

Considering how much his supporters know about history and the Constitution, the mere fact that Common Core isn't actually a "law" shouldn't be an impediment at all for Ted Cruz. And in fact, we feel a little bit elitist and snobby for even pointing out that it isn't.

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[ThinkProgress]