How can you tell when a politician like Senator Ted Cruz of Texas is lying? When he talks about the need to let “the people” decide. What he really means is “the game is rigged and the insiders get to decide.”
Take, for example, what Mr. Cruz said when President Obama nominated Judge Merrick Garland to the Supreme Court. The Senate should not vote on Judge Garland, Mr. Cruz said, because he wanted “We the People” (his capitalization) to “exercise our authority to decide the direction of the Supreme Court and the Bill of Rights.”
By “we the people,” he meant himself and his fellow right-wingers in the Senate. He wants to hold open the vacancy on the Supreme Court so he can fill it if by some tragic twist of fate he becomes president next year.
Also, consider what Mr. Cruz is saying about the race for the Republican nomination. “If we go to a contested convention where nobody has a majority, it will be the delegates who were elected by the people who make the final decision,” Mr. Cruz said on MSNBC last week. He said the delegates “have been elected by the voters in the first place, and this is a battle to earn the support of the American voters across the country.”
If you don’t speak political propagandese, Mr. Cruz doesn’t actually mean any of that.
After his third-place finish in New York, Mr. Cruz can’t win enough delegates in primaries to secure the nomination, so he is hoping that Mr. Trump won’t get an absolute majority of G.O.P. delegates before the convention. That means there might be more than one round of balloting, and the individual state party rules allow many delegates to vote for anyone they want after the first ballot. In that first vote, they may be bound, at least theoretically, by the results of the primary or caucuses in their states.
When you vote in a primary, you express your support for a candidate for the presidency, but what you are actually doing is casting a ballot for a slate of delegates supposedly bound to support that candidate. Who are they? Bet you have no clue.
Only the tiniest slice of voters would have any idea. In some cases, the delegates are not even actually chosen until well after primary day. And it’s even more complicated in states that have caucuses, like Iowa, where the shows of support on that big night in January actually had very little to do with the selection of the convention delegation.
So Mr. Cruz’s operation has been going around the country trying to make sure that the “Trump delegates” will actually be Cruz loyalists, who would switch to him on a second ballot.
It’s a pretty shady system, but the political parties get to decide how their nominating processes work. And the point, of course, is to make sure the party insiders can change the results if they don’t like them. It just hasn’t happened in a half century.
It’s not illegal or immoral for Mr. Cruz to try this way of winning the nomination. It’s just kind of creepy. And it has nothing to do with the letting “the people” decide.