Some highlights in DC | Tom Camfield

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HAS IT BEEN ONLY A YEAR? Actually, yes; it was exactly a year ago this past Friday — noted overnight editor Ed Mazza of HuffPost — when Donald Trump presented one of the most likely wildest few moments in presidential history.

“As the nation battled the coronavirus pandemic, Trump went on television and delivered what could only be described as medical improv. He said government scientists would be testing ‘very powerful light’ inside the body to kill the virus, as well as disinfectant taken ‘by injection’ which would be ‘almost a cleaning’.”

Trump later claimed he was being “sarcastic,” despite the fact that he made the remarks during a nationally televised news conference in the middle of a pandemic. However, his comments were followed by a rise in accidental poisonings involving disinfectants such as bleach, something Dr. Anthony Fauci, who was not at the news conference, later admitted he was worried would happen.

“You’re going to have people who hear that from the president and they’re going to start doing dangerous and foolish things,” Fauci had opined. A year later, April 22, 2021, Covid-19 deaths in the U.S. alone officially had totaled 569,404.

Trump, however, denied any responsibility:

With Trump (somewhat temporarily at least) on the sidelines until the 2022 mid-terms, we have in his place practiced GOP liar Ted Cruz. He was re-elected in an unusually close Senate race in 2018 against Democratic candidate Beto O’Rourke. In 2016, Cruz ran for President of the United States, placing second behind Donald Trump in the Republican primary. The competition for the Republican presidential nomination between Trump and Cruz was deeply acrimonious and characterized by a series of public personal attacks. While Cruz initially declined to endorse Trump's campaign once he won the nomination, he later became a staunch Trump supporter during the latter's presidency.

it also was Mazza who reported Friday that “Twitter users called out Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) on Thursday over an easily debunked claim he made about Republicans and the Supreme Court.

“During a press conference to urge President Joe Biden to reject any attempt to expand the Supreme Court Cruz said: “You didn't see Republicans when we had control of the Senate try to rig the game. You didn't see us try to pack the court."

Critics were quick to point out that in 2016, Senate Republicans, led by then-Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, blocked then-President Barack Obama’s appointment of Merrick Garland to a Supreme Court seat for almost a year. At the time, Republicans claimed that an open court seat could not be filled in an election year.

After Donald Trump won the 2016 election, Garland’s nomination died. Senate Republicans then nixed the filibuster for Supreme nominations in 2017 to confirm Neil Gorsuch instead, the first of three Trump appointments to the court. In 2020, when Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died just weeks before the election, Senate Republicans forgot the McConnell Rule about keeping such seats open and rushed to confirm Amy Coney Barrett to the court.

“Given those very recent events, Cruz’s critics weren’t buying his claim that Republicans hadn’t rigged the system to stack the court.”

Here’s the first of many Twitter responses: “Gaslighting 101 on display here. Republicans practically sprained their ankles rushing to steal Ginsburg’s seat before the election.”