Ted Cruz ripped over 'ham-handed' school shooting bills: 'They're not even fully formed pieces of legislation!'
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) was shredded by Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) during the Senate proceedings on Thursday.
Cruz, like other Republicans, has focused on making schools more impenetrable as a mechanism for stopping school shootings. The Tennessee shooter fired on the doors to the school, making it possible for her to climb through. An AR-15, however, can penetrate bullet-proof vests used by police officers. So, the doors that would have to be used by a school couldn't merely be particle board.
Then there's the matter of windows. If the shooter could blow through the doors to get inside, couldn't the shooter also shoot windows to get into the school? It's unclear if Republicans will propose schools without windows and steel doors.
Cruz's next demand is that police officers be put into schools. That hasn't been a helpful solution either. The school officer on hand at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, didn't go inside the building when there were reports of shots fired. In Uvalde, Texas, dozens of police were on hand to fight back against the shooter there. Instead, they refused to go up against the AR-15, knowing it would penetrate their Kevlar vests.
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There's also an added problem that Republicans continue to complain about crime in communities and strained police departments. With a police force guarding every school in a community, it would make it difficult to fully staff the rest of the city. Such proposals are little more than a bandage to heal an amputation.
"The senator is right," Murphy agreed. "I have very little interest in engaging on the merits of these proposals in a dialogue on the floor of the Senate because they are not serious attempts to make our kids safer. These unanimous consent requests that Senator Cruz makes, they're going to get a lot of clicks online. The confrontation that he's looking for will probably lead to a bunch of cable news appearances being booked, but it's not going to save any kids' lives. The senator knows this is not how the Senate works. This isn't an autocracy. It's not a dictatorship. You don't come down here and introduce a piece of legislation and two mains later — two minutes later demand that the entirety of the Senate agree to it without any debate, any negotiation."
He went on to call it "so ham-handed" that in one of the Cruz bills, "there's literally brackets and question marks in the text. The legislative drafters, at least in the version that I see, haven't made decisions on when the money is being spent."
He went on to call out Cruz for not caring about the gun safety bills until it was politically advantageous for his cable news appearances. He along with other lawmakers of both parties have spent years working on a bill that both sides could agree to. Murphy said that Cruz has never been part of that.
"What happened last summer after the shooting in the senator's state is that serious members of this body, members of this body who are more interested in legislating than enacting political theater, sat down together and negotiated a bill to save children's lives," Murphy continued. It "didn't solve all of the problems in this country. Didn't guarantee every child's safety. No, it did not. But let's be clear, Sen. Cruz never expressed one iota of interest in being part of those negotiations. Other Republican senators did. And while I understand he objects to the gun provisions in that bill, guess what? That bill also put $15 billion into school safety, into mental health, into hardening our schools, into community anti-gun violence programs. I can't speak about the other members of the group that authored that bill, but I never got a single phone call from Sen. Cruz during the month of negotiations suggesting that we add the language he's talking about to that proposal."
He further shamed Cruz for his inaction and disinterest in solutions while pushing his own performative bills he'll blame Democrats for voting against.
Cruz's communications team complained to Raw Story on Twitter that Murphy was given an older version of the bill.
See Murphy and Cruz's video below or at the link here.
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