Sen. Cruz: Democrats are ‘Perfectly Happy to Tear Down the Institutions of Democracy’ to Ram Through Radical Agenda

WASHINGTON, D.C. - As Democrats ramp up their efforts to politically weaponize the U.S. Supreme Court, U.S. Sens. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), and Marsha Blackburn (R-Tenn.) today spoke in front of the Supreme Court and urged Democrats to preserve the independence of our judiciary and halt their brazen efforts to pack the Court with far-left justices. Highlights of Sen. Cruz's remarks are below.

WATCH: Sen. Cruz on Democrats Packing the Supreme Court: Democrats are ‘Perfectly Happy to Tear Down the Institutions of Democracy'

"What is it that makes America special? What is it that makes America different? In America we believe in the rule of law. In America we don't have government by men or women, but rather every person is under the law. We are standing before what is a temple to justice. This institution, the Supreme Court of the United States, has stood up to political pressures from the very first day America was a nation. It has stood up against buffeting politics. The Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education decreed that the despicable practice of segregated schools and Jim Crow laws were no longer acceptable in America, and struck them down. The justices had the courage to have the independence to follow the law, and follow the Constitution. What differentiates America from dictatorships - my father fled Cuba under a communist dictatorship - today banana republics, the dictators don't have courts that follow the law, they instead have puppet judges that do what they want. When Hugo Chavez came in in Venezuela, one of the first things he did is destroy the Court and take it over.

"What Senate Democrats and House Democrats are trying to do is fundamentally corrupt - their first priority is to change the rules to stay in power. That tells you a lot of things - it tells you, number one, they don't believe in Democracy, they don't believe in the voters. If they want to stay in power, there's a real simple path to that - convince the voters your ideas are right. But that's too complicated. Sometimes the voters disagree. So what are Senate Democrats trying to do? They are trying to add new senators to the Senate so they keep control forever. They are trying to change voting in America so Democrats can never lose. And they want to pack the Supreme Court with four left-wing radicals. This is an assault, fundamentally, on the independence of the Judiciary. Franklin Delano Roosevelt tried this nearly a hundred years ago. He had a Democratic super majority in the House, he had a Democratic super majority in the Senate, and his own party stopped him. FDR, at the height of his popularity, they said, ‘No, this is a bad idea. Packing the Court is a bad idea, it with threaten our fundamental freedoms.' Unfortunately, today's Democratic party is a lot more radical than the Democratic party used to be, and they're perfectly happy to tear down the institutions of democracy, to tear down the institutions that protect our constitution in order to try to ram though their agenda."

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"So many of our fundamental rights are hanging by a single vote - hanging in the balance. Free speech, the right of every one of us to come out here and speak, and say what you believe. We are one vote away from free speech being stripped away, and Congress having the power to punish you for exercising your right to free speech for speaking about politics. Religious liberty, the fundamental right to worship God according to our own faith. You know, a few minutes ago we had a woman who was out here praying and blowing the shofar exercising her religious liberty. We are one vote away from your religious liberty rights being taken away.

"The Second Amendment, the right to keep and bear arms - Lindsey talked about the Heller case. I represented 21 states in the Heller case, the foundational case establishing the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms. That vote was five to four. The four dissenting justices were prepared effectively to erase the Second Amendment from the Bill of Rights, to conclude that no American anywhere has an individual right to keep and bear arms. These are radical and extreme ideas, and by the way, they're incredibly unpopular ideas. There's a reason the Democrats don't want to actually go to the voters and try to convince the voters to do this, because the voters would tell them to jump in a lake. So instead, they're trying to rig the game. Instead, they're trying to fix the system. They're behaving like corrupt politicians, and by the way, just a few years ago, Republicans were in the same position. In 2017, all of us were here. We had a Republican president, a Republican Senate, and a Republican House. We didn't do this. We could've."

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"You didn't see Republicans when we had control of the Senate try to rig the game. You didn't see us try to pack the Court. There was nothing that would've prevented Republicans from doing what they're doing other than respect for the rule of law, other than basic decency, other than recognizing that democracy matters, and packing the Court and tearing down the institutions that protect our rights is fundamentally wrong. The American people need to know this is not - look, we can have arguments back and forth about tax rates. Democrats want to raise taxes, we don't. Fine, that's the bread and butter of politics, that's the kind of thing you're supposed to debate in the Capitol. What we shouldn't be debating is a radical plan to destroy the United States Supreme Court, to destroy judicial independence, and to destroy the rights that are protected in the Bill of Rights. All of those are hanging in the balance."

In February, Sen. Cruz introduced the "Keep Nine" constitutional amendment to prevent the expansion or contraction of the Supreme Court, and a second legislative proposal that would stop Democrats from unilaterally passing any Court-packing legislation in the United States Senate. Sen. Cruz previously introduced these proposals in October 2020.

WATCH: Exposed: Democrats' Radical Power Plot

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