Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) on Wednesday dismissed Democrats’ concerns about attorney general nominee Sen. Jeff Sessions’ (R-AL) record on civil rights by arguing that it was Democrats who promoted Jim Crow laws and formed the Ku Klux Klan.
The Texas senator was responding to Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s (D-MA) speech on the Senate floor Tuesday night opposing Sessions.
Cruz said in an interview on Fox News that Warren used a “false smear” against Sessions.
The Democratic senator was silenced by her Republican colleagues for reading aloud a 1986 letter from Coretta Scott King opposing Sessions’ nomination to be a federal judge. In the letter, King said that Sessions had promoted racist policies.
Cruz on Wednesday said that Democrats use racism as a crutch and accused them of hypocrisy.
“When the left doesn’t have any other arguments they go and just accuse everyone of being a racist, and it’s an ugly, ugly part of the modern Democratic Party,” he said.
“I’ll point out the Democrats are the party of the Ku Klux Klan,” Cruz added. “You look at the most racist, the Dixiecrats, they were Democrats who imposed segregation, imposed Jim Crow laws who founded the Klan. The clan was founded by a great many Democrats. And yet now the Democrats just accuse anyone they disagree with of being a racist.”
