Ted Cruz Wants A Hundred Senators Like Jesse Helms

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX)

by Laura Clawson

We already know that giving a speech to a white supremacist organization won't get you booted out of House Republican leadership. Now we get to learn what effect lavishly praising a viciously racist former senator will have on Ted Cruz's presidential run.

Ted Cruz, 2013:

The willingness to say all those crazy things is a rare, rare characteristic in this town, and you know what? It’s every bit as true now as it was then. We need a hundred more like Jesse Helms in the U.S. Senate.

That's this Jesse Helms:

Once in office, Helms filibustered the legislation creating the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday for 16 days and called the Civil Rights Act “the single most dangerous piece of legislation ever introduced in the Congress.” Helms was notorious for exploiting racial animus in his political campaigns, most famously running an ad featuring “a pair of white hands crumpling a rejection letter” while the narrator said “You needed that job and you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority.”

"All those crazy things" Helms was willing to say? Obsidian Wings collected quite a few. Like this:

“No intelligent Negro citizen should be insulted by a reference to this very plain fact of life. It is time to face honestly and sincerely the purely scientific statistical evidence of natural racial distinction in group intellect.

Or this:

To rob the Negro of his reputation of thinking through a problem in his own fashion is about the same as trying to pretend that he doesn't have a natural instinct for rhythm and for singing and dancing.

That's what Ted Cruz thinks we need 100 more of in the Senate. As for himself, he thinks he and his Jesse Helms-worship belong in the White House.