Ted Cruz’s Hurricane Warning Hilariously Backfires

Nobody seems to trust Ted Cruz anymore.

The Texas senator’s simple hurricane warning message was ill received by state residents late Sunday, apparently reminding the Lone Star citizens of another one of his climate misfires.

Cruz reshared an emergency relief video made by local businessman Jim McIngvale, better known as Mattress Mack to Houstonites, offering help should the storm take a turn for the worse. Cruz urged people to stay safe, ahead of Hurricane Beryl’s landfall.

“Mack is an American hero,” Cruz wrote on X. “Stay safe & avoid high water as the hurricane makes landfall.”

But sending a message of care to Texas residents reminded too many critics of 2021, when Cruz ditched his constituents—and his dog—during a historic winter storm to take a conveniently timed trip to Cancun, Mexico. That record cold snap, and Texas’s failure to mitigate damage to critical infrastructure, resulted in the deaths of 246 people.

Cruz’s vacation mishap also led him to propose legislation to reallocate airport security toward high-powered officials, a move that would have made it significantly harder for the press to catch him (and other lawmakers or judges) in efforts to bail during future bad weather. Ultimately, Cruz’s amendment was blocked in April by Mississippi Representative Bennie Thompson.

“I’m glad that sanity prevailed and this provision—which almost no one really wanted—wasn’t included in the final FAA bill text,” Thompson said in a statement at the time. “Congress should be focusing on improving TSA and keeping our skies more secure, not burdening its workforce and potentially diminishing security.”

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene spent the Fourth of July weekend getting barbecued after boldly declaring that several people who did not sign the Declaration of Independence were signers of America’s most well-known document.

Among those Greene incorrectly claimed as signers of the Declaration of Independence was Alexander Hamilton, the subject of an extremely famous Broadway musical about his life prior to and after helping craft and sign the Constitution in 1787—more than a decade after the Declaration of Independence was adopted. In addition, Hamilton was 19 when the Declaration of Independence was signed, not 21 like Greene stated.

It’s unclear where Greene got this information, what prompted her to post it, or why, days after making it, she hasn’t taken it down or corrected it. One user mused that were Greene to have to take a citizenship test, as all immigrants to the United States seeking citizenship must do, she would likely fail, while others wondered how a sitting member of Congress could be so brazenly ill informed about U.S. history.

Other users skewered Greene by building on her list of signers detached from reality, adding names like Karl Marx, Gandalf, Kermit the Frog, and Beethoven.

Only two of the people Greene named actually signed the Declaration of Independence: Thomas Jefferson, who wrote it, and John Hancock, who was the first to sign it. Here’s the full list of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and here’s an explainer about the differences between the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, and the Constitution.

Senator Marco Rubio ran a flimsy defense for Donald Trump Sunday, after the former president tried to distance himself from a conservative think tank’s fascist plan for Trump’s potential presidential takeover.

During an interview on CNN’s State of the Union, Dana Bash played the Florida Republican a clip of Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation. The far-right think tank is behind Project 2025, a sweeping 180-page shadow platform that explains how to roll back rights and tear apart the administrative state and replace civil servants with loyal Trump sycophants.

Bash played a clip of Roberts making a chilling warning during an appearance on the far-right network Real America’s Voice last week. “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless—if the left allows it to be,” he said.

“Are you comfortable with that?” Bash asked Rubio.  

“Well, he’s not running for president, is he?” Rubio said. “I mean, our candidate’s Donald Trump. I didn’t see Donald Trump say that.”

“Donald Trump’s running on common sense, on restoring common sense versus the lunacy of the last four years, on the far left, and the shadow government that now is running our country with Joe Biden as its figurehead. That’s what he’s running against.

“Think tanks do think-tank stuff,” Rubio said, as nonchalantly as one might say, “Fascists do fascist stuff.”

“Look, I like the Heritage Foundation, I agree with some of the things they stand for,” but, Rubio said, the group has a lot of different projects. 

“And Donald Trump is running on restoring common sense, working-class values, and making our decision on the basis of that, and not on ideological lunacy, which is what we’ve seen over the last four years under Joe Biden.”

“Is that what Project 2025 is, is ideological lunacy?” Bash asked. 

“No, I think it’s the work of a think tank. Of a center-right think tank, and that’s what think tanks do,” Rubio said, going on to argue that plenty of “left-wing think tanks” and “opinion writers” had now become the policy of the Biden administration. How that point could possibly help his argument that Project 2025 should not concern voters is unclear.

Since Roberts’s cryptic threat last week, Trump has tried to claim that he doesn’t know what Project 2025 even is, although it was written by several former members of his administration. 

More top Democrats are vehemently shifting away from President Joe Biden after a disastrous debate performance last month revealed key issues with the chief executive’s age.

The number of lawmakers who believed that Biden should throw in the towel in the 2024 race outweighed the number backing his decision to stay in, during a Democratic leadership call on Sunday afternoon. At least four more prominent Democratic representatives joined a growing chorus urging Biden to step out, reported NBC News. Those lawmakers included New York Representatives Jerry Nadler and Joe Morelle, California Representative Mark Takano, and Washington Representative Adam Smith. All four men serve as the ranking members on powerful House committees.

But even lawmakers who didn’t outright agree that the former president’s place on the November ballot was compromised thoroughly questioned his ability to retake the White House for a second term. Maryland Representative Jamie Raskin, Virginia Representative Don Beyer, and Connecticut Representative Jim Himes expressed concerns that Biden was not the strongest candidate the party could put forward.

Most lawmakers on the call believed that Vice President Kamala Harris would be a stronger option at the top of the ticket, calling her the obvious choice to replace Biden should he leave the race.

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries held the hour-long call with the Democratic brass but did not weigh in with his opinion on the movement to oust Biden, according to CNN.

Last week, Representatives Lloyd Doggett, Raúl Grijalva, and Seth Moulton formally called on the president to exit the race. But many more have signaled their preference in subtler ways, including legacy politicians such as Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the latter of whom suggested that growing concern over both candidates’ ages was a “legitimate question.”

Panic over Biden’s age and ability has consumed the Democratic Party since the president’s abysmal debate performance last week, during which he appeared dumbfounded and frail through the majority of his first 2024 matchup against Donald Trump. Since the face-off, droves of private-sector leaders, donors, and consultants have urged Biden to call it quits, looking for spontaneous alternatives to a candidate that they openly describe as “comatose” and “dead.”

Donald Trump’s lawyers on Friday used the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling—and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s concurring opinion—to argue that his entire classified documents case should be put on hold until the constitutionality of special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment is clarified.

Trump’s legal team filed a notice of supplemental authority asking the Trump-appointed Cannon to review Smith’s qualifications to pursue the case, citing Thomas’s opinion that questioned whether Smith was legally appointed to his position.

“Highlighting grave separation-of-powers concerns, Justice Thomas suggested that [U.S. penal code 28 subsections 515 and 533] do not establish ‘by Law’ Jack Smith’s position under the Appointments Clause,” the motion states.

In an ouroboros of conservative chaos, Thomas’s questioning follows Trump’s lawyers crafting that argument to Cannon, which The New York Times describes as one of the “far-fetched issues” Trump’s team has raised in an effort to remove Smith from the case. A notice of supplemental authority is essentially a summary of notable concerns addressed in oral arguments, meaning Trump’s lawyers argued against Smith being on the case, which Thomas in his concurrent Supreme Court opinion that ruled in Trump’s favor also floated, which Trump’s lawyers then used as support for their argument to remove Smith.

The notice follows hearings held by Cannon exploring whether Smith was legally appointed. The crux of the argument from Trump’s lawyers (and Thomas) is that special prosecutors have so much power, they should be voted into their roles by Congress and that Smith’s appointment is unconstitutional—even though settled law states the attorney general can appoint a special prosecutor and they are accountable to the attorney general.

“The legal issues and questions she claims to be struggling with are quite basic,” Joëlle Anne Moreno, a law professor at Florida International University, told The New York Times in June. “Most judges would consider many of the defense arguments to be meritless.”

Cannon has struggled with basic law concepts, is reportedly prone to exploitation due to her inexperience, and has shown unusual deference for Trump—including intervening in a Trump lawsuit arguing the classified documents he kept were his personal property, which Cannon ruled in his favor only for it to be overturned. That failed intervention provoked calls from more experienced judges to encourage Cannon to pass the case over to a better qualified judge when it was assigned to her in 2023, which she refused. Cannon also postponed the case indefinitely in May, and has spent weeks entertaining questions about Smith’s qualifications and funding with ineptitude that legal experts have described as “bonkers.”