Last month, Glenn Beck explained to a live studio audience about how Ted Cruz, if elected president, could use the constitutional provision declaring that “the Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate” to essentially use his vice president to take complete control of the Senate.
Claiming that he had “no information on this” and was just “thinking outside of the box,” Beck envisioned a scenario in which Cruz would name a “pit bull” like Carly Fiorina as his running mate and then instruct her to “go run the Senate,” creating a situation in which “the White House is running the Senate as well.”
Like Beck, right-wing pseudo-historian David Barton has very close ties to Cruz and his presidential campaign, and last week he spoke to a small group at Liberty University. That speech was attended by a Liberty graduate student who reported that Barton floated the exact same plan:
Barton spoke strongly in support of Ted Cruz’s decision to appoint Carly Fiorina as his running mate and suggested that her role in a Cruz presidency will be much more significant than the Vice President’s role in years past. If elected, the Cruz campaign plans to reinstate the VP’s reign over the Senate in the hopes of nullifying the influence of the president pro tempore, who commonly acts in the VP’s absence. This is another interesting development given the history of Cruz’s clashes with the GOP establishment.
While Beck initially presented this scenario as something of a hypothetical idea, the report on Barton suggests that this is something that he either learned directly from Cruz or his campaign or something that has at least been discussed among top-level Cruz supporters.
The fact that two key Cruz backers are promoting this idea raises the question of whether this is something that the Cruz campaign is actually planning on carrying out if the Texas senator, notorious for his poor relationships with senators on both sides of the aisles, wins the White House.
Cruz, who has been campaigning in Indiana alongside Beck, has not yet been asked if he plans to put his surrogates’ idea into action if elected.
