With the support of 42 other GOP senators, Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas introduced a resolution yesterday afternoon to commend the president for ordering “successful operations” in Iranian terrorist Qassam Soleimani’s death and to honor the members of U.S. military and intelligence agencies who aided in the targeted killing of “a terrorist responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people across the Middle East, including 603 US service members.”
Cruz hoped partisan divisions would be sufficiently and temporarily suppressed for the sake of commending the administration for destroying the mastermind behind the world’s largest state sponsor of terror. However, not one Democratic senator could marshal the courage to co-sponsor the resolution with him.
Indeed, Cruz purposely analogized the resolution to the one introduced in 2011 honoring those who ordered and assisted in the killing of Osama bin Laden. Senate Resolution 159 was introduced by Sen. Harry Reid (D-CA) just three days after U.S. forces killed bin Laden under President Obama in May 2011. That resolution was sponsored by the entire Senate, serving as an emphatic symbol of the chamber’s capacity for bipartisan statements — at least when they praise Democrats.
Cruz’s resolution is deliberately modeled after the language used in Reid’s resolution. Indeed, a side-by-side comparison of S. Resolution 159 and Cruz’s Soleimani resolution indicates that the main method for penning Cruz’s resolution was substituting words, swapping the crimes of bin Laden for the crimes of Soleimani and subbing Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) for al-Qaeda.
Both resolutions emphasize the importance of “bringing terrorists to justice” through “defeating, disrupting, and dismantling” the respective organizations of bin Laden and Soleimani.” But most importantly, both offered unequivocal praise for the intelligence community, the U.S. Armed Forces, and the president.
Cruz’s resolution arrives at a critical time, when the Democrats seem overwhelmingly poisoned by partisanship — to the staggering point that they have struggled to even refer to Soleimani as a terrorist, despite his leadership role in a group formally designated a foreign terrorist organization (FTO) by the U.S. State Department. Nothing symbolizes this disturbing recalcitrance more than the fact that Cruz could not convince one Democrat to co-sponsor the Soleimani resolution with him. Compare this objectively pathetic response to the one Reid managed to muster, which resulted in the entire Senate sponsoring the resolution.
Commending those who killed a terrorist responsible for the loss of hundreds of American lives should not be a controversial endeavor, and Cruz’s choice to lift words directly from S. Resolution 159 represents a substantial attempt to keep this venture as non-partisan as possible. Regardless, congressional records reveal that 26 Democratic senators sponsored Reid’s resolution against bin Laden but opted not to sponsor Cruz’s resolution against Soleimani. Meanwhile, the entire Senate GOP sponsored Reid’s resolution and most of the current Senate GOP sponsored Cruz’s.
This disparity in voting records tells a story about the state of the modern Democratic Party and how partisan hackery has eroded its moral compass. Given the two resolutions employed the same language and were both directed at a purely evil contributor to myriad murders, it’s difficult to generate any rational conclusion as to why not one Democrat could gather the moral fortitude to sponsor the resolution.
Yet we know precisely why those 26 Democrats abstained from joining Cruz’s resolution. They hate Trump more than they find inherent moral value in destroying evil, and it’s becoming increasingly apparent that these are the actions of deeply unserious people. Cruz likely was testing how far the Democrats would allow their detestation of Trump to cloud their ability to celebrate the demonstrable Good and condemn the objective Bad. Apparently, quite a bit.
But why should we express surprise or consternation? One Democratic member of Congress explained the Iranian confrontation to a Washington Post reporter, uttering, “You need two crazy leaders to start a war, and fortunately, Iran doesn’t have one.” Yes, this elected member of Congress believes there is a moral equivalency between a regime that hangs gay people from cranes, forces women to don specific clothing, and slaughters thousands globally each year via proxy terror groups. It’s simply psychotic.
Even a mere glimpse of Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) giggling as her fellow representative discussed those Soleimani killed provides a peripheral data point of how Senate Democrats’ rot seems to unsurprisingly apply to the other chamber, as well. It’s certainly and thankfully not every Democrat who exercises such morally bankrupt logic, but the theatrics seem to emanate from unfortunately the most visible and vocal.
With the death of Soleimani, Senate Democrats had an opportunity to locate the objective Bad but explicitly chose not to. For all their cries of “Orange man bad!” and analogies comparing Trump to Stalin or Hitler, it seems they are demonstrably challenged and utterly incompetent at identifying what genuinely constitutes “bad.” In the same way House Democrats bemoaned condemning antisemitism explicitly, it seems Senate Democrats can’t muster the courage to despise a terrorist more than they despise Trump.
