Echoing Trump, Ted Cruz falsely claims ‘the Democrats are arguing for abolishing the police’

WASHINGTON – Sen. Ted Cruz falsely claimed Wednesday that the Democratic Party supports “abolishing the police.”

President Donald Trump trotted out the same unsubstantiated allegation three weeks ago, and Cruz’s broadside dovetails with his effort this week to portray Democrats as fellow travelers of “antifa,” a loose affiliation of anarchists the White House blames for clashes at protests against police brutality.

“Two months ago if I told you the Democrats are arguing for abolishing the police you would have said, come on Ted that that’s a bit nuts; no one is going to embrace that. That’s where the angry extreme in the Democratic Party is and it’s driving their agenda,” Cruz said.

Abolishing police is not part of the Democratic Party platform.

Trump’s challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden, explicitly rejects calls to “defund the police.”

Most advocates of “defunding” don’t mean elimination of funding. They mean shifting some funds away from traditional policing into social workers or improving public health and education to reduce poverty and crime.

Cruz made his claim Wednesday during a livestreamed interview with Washington Post political reporter Robert Costa. He attributed the policy to Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

“We’re seeing a phenomenon where the Democratic Party – they’ve really unleashed the craziest voices in their party. The people who are driving the train – it’s not Joe Biden. Instead the voices that are ascendant are Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and AOC and they’re pushing socialism. They’re embracing radical positions like abolishing the police,” he asserted.

The comments came a day after Cruz led a hearing on antifa at which Democrats accused him of echoing scare tactics Trump has used to justify sending troops and federal tactical units into U.S. cities.

Warren and Sanders have distanced themselves from the “defund” movement. Neither has advocated for abolishing police departments.

Ocasio-Cortez does embrace the “defund” movement.

Cruz aides, asked for evidence that “the Democrats” or even the ones he mentioned by name want to abolish the police, pointed to a blog post last week in which he asserted that “Democrats are abandoning the brave men and women of law enforcement, while embracing violent Antifa criminals and other anti-American anarchists.”

They also cited a June 30 statement from Ocasio-Cortez when New York Mayor Bill de Blasio proposed cutting the New York Police Department budget by $1 billion, or about one-sixth.

She insisted that was not sufficient, saying: “Defunding police means defunding police.”

Sanders has called for spending more to pay and train local police, a stance that has invited pushback from some progressives.

“Do I think we should not have police departments in America? No, I don’t. There’s no city in the world that does not have police departments,” Sanders said two months ago in an interview with The New Yorker.

That was roughly a week after the death of George Floyd, a Black suspect who was pinned to the ground at the neck under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer who now faces a murder charge.

At the time, Warren was among the leading Democratic lawmakers distancing themselves from a brewing movement to “defund the police.”

Defunding, she said, is “not the term I would use,” though she emphasized the need to “listen to the pain and the lived experiences of the people who are protesting.”

Only a relative handful of “defund the police” activists mean they want to slash budgets to zero, which would be tantamount to “abolishing” the police.

Sanders, Warren and Sen. Edward Markey of Massachusetts have proposed ending qualified immunity for police. That’s a legal doctrine that critics say is too often used to shield wrongdoers from accountability when they violate the law while on duty.

Republicans generally resist that move, which the Democrat-run House has already approved.

Cruz’s false claim about a Democratic move to abolish police echoed debunked assertions that Trump made three weeks ago.

“They want to close our prisons. They now want to abolish our police departments,” the president asserted in a July 14 speech in the Rose Garden in which he embellished and distorted Biden’s platform.

Trump made the assertion again two days later: “Joe Biden and his bosses from the radical left want to significantly multiply what they’re doing now. And what will be the end result is you will totally destroy the beautiful suburbs. Suburbia will be no longer as we know it. So they wanted to defund and abolish your police and law enforcement while at the same time destroying our great suburbs.”

In mid-June, with the nation in the throes of protests after Floyd’s death, Biden wrote an op-ed in USA Today making clear his opposition to the “defund” movement.

“While I do not believe federal dollars should go to police departments violating people’s rights or turning to violence as the first resort, I do not support defunding police,” he wrote. “The better answer is to give police departments the resources they need to implement meaningful reforms, and to condition other federal dollars on completing those reforms.”