In that race, Cruz had aggressively highlighted his efforts during a past emergency, Hurricane Harvey. While a senator cannot personally restore the power grid, Sullivan said, “people expect their elected officials to be fully engaged during a crisis.”Ĭruz, 50, narrowly won reelection in 2018 against Beto O’Rourke, a Democratic former congressman, carrying less than 51% of the vote. “It was clearly an error in judgment,” said Ray Sullivan, an Austin-based Republican strategist who served as chief of staff to former Gov. He may not be able to turn on a switch to fix the problem today, but he could show up and stand beside people who are losing their homes, who have lost their relatives.Ted Cruz’s decision to leave his state in the middle of an emergency was an especially confounding one for an ambitious politician who has already run for president once and is widely seen as wanting to run again in 2024 or beyond. “We elect officials to not only represent us but to stand with us when we're suffering. “It shows a lack of empathy,” one Texan told Fox 26 of Cruz’s trip. In Houston, a crowd of reporters and frustrated Texans waited for their senator to arrive. ![]() “What’s happening in Texas is unacceptable and a lot of Texans are hurting,” Cruz told MSNBC in an interview before his flight back to Houston. “I started having second thoughts almost the moment I sat down on the plane,” Cruz told reporters, adding that he “has a responsibility, I take very seriously, of fighting for the state of Texas.”Ĭruz, caught in a widening political scandal of his own making, attempted to project a civic-minded concern for the humanitarian crisis engulfing his state. He claimed that he immediately started feeling uncomfortable about the trip as soon as he buckled in for his departing flight. In a hastily-called press conference in Houston after his return on Thursday, Cruz called the trip “a mistake” and ruefully admitted that his original idea had been to “stay through the weekend with the family.” ![]() In his Thursday statement, he implied that this was his plan all along, but according to a source with knowledge of the situation, his flight back home was originally scheduled for Saturday, and he booked a new return ticket a few hours after landing in Mexico. So, Cruz headed back to the airport to return to Texas. Once Cruz landed in Cancun and presumably took his phone off airplane mode, the notifications couldn’t have been pretty. Still, planes are taking off-and landing. Extreme conditions have made transportation next to impossible in the state, as roads and infrastructure are not equipped to handle long stretches of sub-freezing temperatures. Some Texans are also running out of food. In order to stay warm, families are resorting to sitting in their cars, which has skyrocketed the number of carbon monoxide poisoning deaths in the state. ![]() ![]() Unlike Cruz, many Texans can’t get up and leave for sunny skies and are in fact literally freezing to death. In Austin, hospitals were reportedly resorting to garbage and biohazard bags to manually remove human feces from toilets. Hospitals, already strained by the COVID-19 pandemic, ran out of water and were forced to evacuate patients. While the senator was enjoying his in-flight amenities, millions of Texans were left without power and water. “Wanting to be a good dad, I flew down with them last night and am flying back this afternoon.” “With school canceled for the week, our girls asked to take a trip with friends,” Cruz said in the statement. He didn’t take any responsibility for leaving the state while it was in shambles, but instead blamed the trip on his daughters. After pictures of the senator started to circulate online, including images of him maskless in an airport lounge on Wednesday, Cruz said in a statement Thursday that he was on his way home.
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