It is just so craven and brazen that of course it had to pass through.

The recent Covid relief bill passage has been a disturbing lesson in D.C. being a festering hive of villainy. The bill was a pork-laden fiasco approaching $2trillion in scope, with a fraction of that actually going to relief for citizens. The rest was garbage pork projects, bailouts for states that tanked their own economies, and propping up failing union pension programs, along with other utter wasteful garbage. To lend this the proper perspective, in order to give citizens $1,400 of their own money it will end up costing them over $5,000.  

In the course of formulating this travesty Ted Cruz attempted to have an amendment added that would prevent illegals in the country from receiving stimulus checks. There was a contentious exchange on the Senate floor involving Cruz, Sen Dick Durbin, and majority leader Chuck Schumer. Cruz was branded a liar by onetime celebrity Morgan Fairchild and the Senator took the Tommy Flanagan moment as an opportunity to illustrate the problem with Washington, and the press.

1/x THREAD

Want to understand why we’re so divided? Why each side seems to live in alternate universes? Take a moment & examine the misinformation here (both deliberate & inadvertent).

FACT 1: Dem spending bill sends $1400 to each adult in US.

FACT 2: Dems voted against… https://t.co/gqk1QnG3GY

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) March 7, 2021

The once-fair Ms. Fairchild based her charge on a piece in The Daily Beast – always a flawed strategy — and Sen. Cruz walked us through the process he endured on the Senate floor. Cruz wanted to add an amendment to the bill that would prevent checks from being sent out to convicted criminals in prisons, and to illegal immigrants. Durbin accused Cruz of being a liar, on the basis that illegals are not granted Social Security numbers, the standard used for who will be receiving the checks.

3/x FACT 4: Durbin then screamed “liar!” and insisted no illegal immigrants would get $$ because the bill requires social security numbers.

FACT 5: Lefty “press” outlets, like Daily Beast, dutifully repeated Durbin’s charge. They did ZERO fact checking fo their own, just said…

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) March 7, 2021

Durbin was eventually backed by Schumer, the Cruz amendment was struck down, and on March 9 the bill passed as the roiling wasteful monstrosity that it is. And then the truth came out. What Cruz had been driving at was the number of those with a work visa and Green Card status which have expired are considered to be ”visa overstays’’. These are foreign workers who have been issued SS numbers, but their lapsed status means they are now illegals. To underscore that this is not a mere technicality, those in the country with overstays are placed into Deportble Status.

Newsweek, which had also initially proclaimed the claim to be inaccurate, eventually spoke with a representative from US Customs and Border Protection who confirmed that these individuals are in fact deemed illegals; “Technically, if they have overstayed their visa, they are here illegally,” the spokesperson said. This led to the news outlet confirming that Cruz had been accurate.

Facts are stubborn things @DickDurbin

Newsweek CONFIRMS that millions of illegal aliens will receive $1400 stimulus checks.

Newsweek REVERSES its earlier “mostly false” ruling, changes it to…TRUE.

Dick, that means what you said on the floor was FALSE. https://t.co/1aUeSxpTul

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) March 10, 2021

The UCBP gave the most recent status figures for this group, from 2019. That year it was measured that over 675,000 visas were overstayed — with similar numbers for others in the previous years. This was how you get to the numbers that Cruz had been referencing.

Cruz’s claim that millions of illegal immigrants would receive stimulus payments is true, given the amount of people who have overstayed their visas over the years. Once they overstay, they technically are considered “illegal.”

Some credit goes to Newsweek for the fact-check, but their diligence is not entirely laudable; they managed to get around to accuracy only after the bill passed. Tally up those figures of residents with Social Security numbers who will be receiving the payouts and the total sum is easily into the billions of dollars. Of course, this number is dwarfed by the massive size of this bill, but those additional components which have no valid claim of being in a Relief bill are another matter.

But then this is the state of Washington D.C. these days. Billions of dollars wasted are considered a shrug-line in such a monumental legislative disaster, and we arrive at that wastefulness as a result of lying taking place in the Capitol boosted by the subterfuge seen in the supportive media. The dysfunction is not only built into the system but it is becoming a cancer metastasizing into other industries.

10/x Sadly, that’s why we’re so divided. Facts don’t matter.

Journalists don’t care about truth.

Everyone is a partisan warrior.

And we only believe news from our own side.

For America to come together, this must change.

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) March 7, 2021