Yesterday, we noted that Glenn Beck and David Barton, both close friends of Ted Cruz and key supporters of his presidential campaign, have been promoting a plan under which if Cruz becomes president, his vice president, Carly Fiorina, would essentially take over the role of the Senate majority leader in order to give the White House direct control over the Senate.
Citing the provision in the Constitution naming the vice president as the president of the Senate, Barton and Beck have envisioned a scenario in which Fiorina greatly expands what has traditionally been a largely ceremonial role into one where she literally takes control of one half of Congress, creating a situation in which, in Beck’s words, “the White House is running the Senate as well.”
While campaigning for Cruz in Indiana yesterday, Beck introduced Fiorina at a rally and revealed that he had discussed this very plan with her and that she was totally on board.
“What she knows is, when Thomas Jefferson was vice president, he went in and wrote all of the Senate rules,” Beck said. “A true vice president, constitutionally, can walk in and look at somebody like [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell and say, ‘Mitch, you’re in my seat.'”
UPDATE: Beck discussed this idea again on his radio program today, saying that he would like to see Fiorina be “the president of the Senate in more than just title” and use this constitutional provision to “actually control the Senate.”
Fiorina would “use the position to move things forward,” Beck said, because President Cruz would not utilize executive orders to enact his agenda but would instead take control of the Senate through his vice president in order to “restore the balance of power through Congress.”
Such a move, Beck said, would allow Cruz to ensure that nobody in his own party would be able to thwart his agenda. “If you have the president of the Senate being your partner as the vice president, you can actually move things through the Senate, which I think would be exceptional.”
Only in Beck’s bizarro world is the prospect of the Oval Office displacing the Senate majority leader and taking control of one half of Congress seen as an effort to “restore the balance of power.”
