GREEN WAY, IOWA — Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) delivered a speech to supporters in Iowa the morning after CNN hosted the last Republican primary debate of 2015, and sources close to Cruz are hoping it will ingratiate him further to the Republican base.
It’s no secret, aides tell us, that Cruz understands billionaire Donald Trump is “sucking all the Islamaphobia out of the room,” and that the Canadian-born conservative needs to do something to appear “just as fearful and hateful of Muslims” as Trump’s rhetoric makes him seem. However, those same aides say that Cruz has yet to commit himself to a “full-blown anti-Muslim” platform, and that he’d still prefer to sound “a tiny bit reasonable, but not too much as to scare the base into thinking he has compassion for people that don’t look or sound like they do.”
“It’s really quite simple,” Cruz told the rally attendees in Green Way, Iowa Wednesday morning, “we don’t need to outright ban all Muslims from coming in, though that is quite tempting indeed.” Instead, Cruz said, a new Constitution is needed. “But I’m not saying we do anything with the current one,” Cruz said with a finger raised, trying to anticipate and quell the concerns of conservative voters who view the Constitution second only to the book that it was taken directly from in conservative lore, The Holy Bible. “I mean, eventually we’ll repeal the reconstruction amendments and stuff, but for now, we just need an additional Constitution, one just for Muslims,” Cruz said.
Senator Cruz said Muslim Americans should consider the second Constitution a “separate, but equal” document that gives them “basically all the same rights non-Muslims have” with “a couple of minor differences when it comes to unimportant stuff like, civil rights.” Cruz said that “sometimes you have to be honest with yourself and admit that your religion just isn’t as good as other people’s religion” and “the First Amendment has some great ideas, but it’s just not pro-Christian and anti-Muslim enough for the 21st century.”
The evangelical conservative who is seeing his poll numbers surge of late said that once terror attacks from radicalized Muslims “settle back down to levels we tolerate from groups that set fire to Planned Parenthood clinics” he’d consider shredding the Muslim-only Constitution. “But until that time,” Cruz said, “we just don’t know that we can trust this whole notion of presumed innocence and due process, not when it comes to Muslims. And isn’t that really what the Founders wanted — a theocracy where one religion dominates over all others?”
After the rally, Cruz held a press conference and was assailed with questions as to the efficacy, legality, and humane decency involved in creating a subset of citizens based on their religious beliefs. “Meh,” Cruz responded. When another reporter asked why he and his fellow Republicans were so focused on terrorism when it has been the cause of a fraction of the deaths that regular gun violence has since the 9/11 attacks in 2001, Cruz’s eyes glazed over, and then he took a deep breath and spoke.
“That’s different, of course,” Cruz said, “because innocent Americans dying every day by gunfire is a protected and vital aspect of our democracy. Sure, I know that other democracies and free nations don’t have nearly the number of gun deaths we do, but do any of those countries know how rad a gun is? It’s all, like, bang bang, and stuff you know? So I would just ‘Second Amendment’ and leave it that, obviously.”
Cruz is currently placing near the top, but still behind Donald Trump in most recent polling.
