President-elect Joe Biden said on Friday that the Sens. Ted Cruz, R-Texas and Josh Hawley, R-Mo., They should be “totally defeated” in their next election for their part in spreading “the big lie”, a term that senators said was an effort to classify them as Nazis.
“I think they should be defeated the next time they run,” Biden said in remarks on Friday, when asked whether the two senators should step down. Other Democrats asked Cruz to give up his seat.
Biden said Republicans like Cruz and Hawley are a minority of the party.
“The American public has a very clear view of who they are,” said Biden. “They are part of the big lie, the big lie.”
“The Big Lie” was a term coined in Nazi Germany. “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will end up believing it,” said Joseph Goebbels, Nazi Germany’s Reich propaganda minister, once.
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“Very sad,” Cruz wrote on Twitter about Biden’s comments. “In a time of deep national division, the choice of President-elect Biden to call his political opponents literal Nazis does nothing to unite us or promote healing.”
“This kind of perverse party rhetoric only tears our country apart,” he continued.
Hawley fired back with his own statement.
“President-elect Biden just compared me and another Republican senator to the Nazis. You read that right. Think about it for a moment. Let it penetrate. Because I raised questions in the format prescribed by United States laws about how elections were conducted in the state of Pennsylvania, just as the Democrats did with other states in 2001, 2005 and 2017, he is calling me a Nazi, “said Hawley.
The senator in his first term also called the president-elect’s comments “unworthy, immature and intemperate behavior”.
Hawley then offered Biden some advice. “He should act like a worthy adult and retract those sick comments. And every Democratic member of Congress should be asked to repudiate those disgusting comments.”
Cruz and Hawley led efforts in their upper house to challenge the results of some state’s electoral college for Biden. Cruz called for a 10-day emergency audit of allegations of electoral fraud, although such cases were resolved in a federal court. Both continued their call to reject certification of the results, even after a pro-Trump riot that made lawmakers go into hiding and left five dead caused others to withdraw their disputes.
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The president-elect said the two senators were “as responsible” as the president for selling unmasked allegations of electoral fraud.
“If he is [Trump] the only one who says that, is one thing, but the acolytes who follow him, like Cruz and others, are just as responsible as he is, “Biden continued. It is about whether or not they remain in power because of the repulsion that the American people have for their actions. There are decent people out there who really believe these lies. “
Still, the longtime Democrat praised other Republican lawmakers for breaking with Trump on allegations of electoral fraud.
“I was so proud,” said Biden of Kentucky’s majority lead senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, “what he said on the United States Senate floor was in fact the right thing to do.” McConnell urged his Republican colleagues not to oppose the vote to certify the results of the electoral college, saying that “it would harm our republic forever”.
Biden said he had “enormous respect” for Senator Mitt Romney, R-Utah, against whom he ran in 2012 when Romeny was the presidential candidate for the Republican Party and Biden was seeking re-election as vice president with President Obama. He said Romney had “enormous integrity” to face the president and his allegations of electoral fraud.
“There are many more, but there are others who should be ashamed of themselves. But they are a minority in the Republican Party,” continued Biden.
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“We need a Republican Party,” said Biden, “I think you’re going to see them go through this idea of what constitutes the Republican Party.”