24 January 2019, Washington DC, USA
i seldom rise on this floor to contradict somebody on the other side, I have worked very hard over the years to work in a bipartisan way with the presiding officer with my Republican colleagues, but these crocodile tears that the senator from Texas is crying for first responders are too hard for me to take.
They’re too hard for me to take!
When the senator from Texas shut this government down in 2013, my state was flooded. It was under water. People were killed. People's houses were destroyed. Their small businesses were ruined forever. And because of the senator from Texas, this government was shut down for politics.
That he surfed to a second-place finish in the Iowa caucuses. That were of no help to the first responders to the teachers, to the students whose schools were closed, with the federal government that was shit down because of the junior senator from Texas.
Now ‘s it’s his business, not my business, why he supports a president who wants to erect a medieval barrier on the border of Texas. Who wants to use Eminent Domain to build that wall. Who wants to declare an unconstitutional emergency to build that wall?
That’s the business of the Senator from Texas. I can assure you, that in Colorado, if a President said he was going to use Eminent Domain to erect a barrier across the State of Colorado, across the rocky mountains of Colorado, he was going to steal the property of our farmers and ranchers to build his medieval wall, there wouldn’t be an elected leader from our state who would support that. The very idea!
Which goes to my final point.. How ludicrous it is that this government is shut down over a promise the President of the United States couldn’t keep! And that America is not interested in having him keep. This idea that he was going to build a medieval wall across the southern border of Texas, take it from the farmers and ranchers that are there, and have the Mexicans pay for it, isn’t true!
That’s why we’re here. Because he’s now saying the taxpayers are going to have to pay for it. That’s not what he said during the campaign. Over and over and over and over again he said Mexico would pay for the wall.
Over and over again.
And now we’re here with a government shutdown over the President’s broken promise, while the Chinese are landing spacecraft on the dark side of the moon., That’s what they’re doing.
Not to mention what they’re doing in Latin America … while we’re shut down. Over a promise he never thought he’d keep and didn’t keep.
Cruz’s response:
There's an old saying among Texas trial lawyers — if you have the facts, you bang the facts. If you have the law, you bang the law. If you don't have either one, you bang the table. We've seen a whole lot of table-banging right here on this floor. The senator from Colorado spent a great deal of time yelling, spent a great deal of time attacking me personally. I will say in all of my time in the Senate, I don't believe I have ever bellowed or yelled at a colleague on the Senate floor and I hope I never do that.”