Cruz Declares War on ANTIFA and Democrat Enablers
in Move that Spawns Memories of Bathroom Bill Battle

By Mike Hailey
Capitol Inside Editor
July 23, 2020

U.S. Senator Ted Cruz conjured visions of the infamous Texas bathroom bill on Thursday when he launched an investigation into radical left-wing anarchists who he and President Donald Trump are blaming exclusively for violence that's erupted at protests in Portland and other cities across the nation in the past two months.

Cruz also is taking aim in legislation at Democratic local officials who he's portraying at racist killing spree facilitators for failing to crack down hard enough to quash uprisings in the areas they've been elected to represent.

Cruz in the meantime is ignoring the white supremacists and neo-Nazis who've been repeatedly linked by police across the state and the country to rioting that erupted during the Memorial Day weekend with protests over the police killing of Houston native George Floyd in Minneapolis.

Democrats will view the Cruz war on ANTIFA as desperation grandstanding that bears a striking resemblance to Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick's signature initiative that he hatched in a quest to track down a culprit that didn't exist. Patrick had tried to package the measure that became the Legislature's centerpiece issue in 2017 as proposal that was needed to keep women safe when they use the restroom in public places.

Republicans and Democrats alike saw the Patrick bill as a thinly-veiled political stunt designed to discriminate against the LGBTQ community - a view that was reinforced when he didn't try to resurrect it in the 2019 legislative session despite the violence against women he'd claimed to fear two years earlier.

The junior U.S. Senate Republican from Texas could see the push to crush antifascism as a distraction from his tentative opposition to the new stimulus package for federal COVID-19 relief that GOP colleagues have assembled.

Cruz has graced the probe into peaceful protest piracy with elaborate sobriquets with the hearing of the Subcommittee on The Constitution that he chairs officially dubbed as The Right of the People Peaceably to Assemble: Protecting Speech by Stopping Anarchist Violence.

The measure that Cruz filed this week with local officials as the primary targets has been christened as the Restitution for Economic losses Caused by Leaders who Allow Insurrection and Mayhem Act with the nickname the RECLAIM Act.

The panel that Cruz lead is an extension of the Senate Judiciary Committee with U.S. Senator John Cornyn - the senior senator from the Lone Star State - as one of a half-dozen Republicans. The Cruz subcommittee has five Democrats including U.S. Senator Kamala Harris - a California lawmaker who has a chance to be Joe Biden's running mate in November.

Cruz told Fox News this week that the RECLAIM Act would give individuals and businesses the right to sue local authorities for any damages that can be attributed to so-called autonomous zones where protests have ostensibly been allowed to gather without fear of interference from the police.

Cruz is using the clash this week in Portland between protesters and federal Homeland Security Department agents who Trump deployed to the northwestern city in Oregon against the wishes of local leaders, residents and businesses there. Trump has indicated that Portland is a testing ground for his plan for the federal domination of cities and historic monument protection as the keys to an epic comeback in a re-election campaign that's appeared to be imploding for months.

Cruz will hope to do a better job than the president in terms of putting an actual face on ANTIFA - a movement on the left that the Texas solon and other Republicans have railed against without any apparent evidence to substantiate the claims. Democrats and a rapidly-growing number of Republicans see ANTIFA as a fantasy scapegoat for violent demonstrations that Trump has done more single-handedly to fuel than any other individual or group.

"Antifa is fundamentally against free-speech and is using peaceful protests as a cover and an excuse to engage in violence and other criminal actions. We are seeing this most clearly in Portland right now, as criminals are trying to burn down the federal courthouse. The hearing will highlight how Antifa and other anarchists are hijacking peaceful protests and engaging in political violence that is not only criminal, but antithetical to the First Amendment.”

Cruz aired the ANTIFA visions in concert with a rhetorical partisan lashing in a Fox News interview earlier this week.

"And tragically, what these Democrats are doing is racist because the consequence of this […] is that a lot more black lives are being lost, a lot more Hispanic lives are being lost, a lot more white lives are being lost. Murders need to stop, and it's the Democrats creating the environment for this, and it's wrong.”