Here’s a question: Is there anyone on Beyoncé’s green Earth who is as bad at planning an appropriately timed vacation as Sen. Ted Cruz?
One would think that, after getting dragged to hell and back for flying to Cancún, Mexico, with his family in 2021, after it became apparent that his state of Texas was in crisis mode due to the severe effects of a devastating winter storm and a power grid failure that left citizens freezing in their homes — many of whom died as a result — Cruz would make damn sure he never did that again.
But no — same old Ted, different continent.
Over the weekend, Texas was hit with deadly and devastating flash floods, which have reportedly killed more than 100 people in the state. And where was Cruz when all of this began? Greece. Cruz was in Athens, Greece, vacationing while his state was (and still is) in a state of crisis once again.
But don’t worry, folks. The senator representing Texas is home now, and, according to his office, as soon as he heard the news of the flooding, he rushed home from his European vacation “as fast as humanly possible.”
But did he, though? According to the Daily Beast, the senator could have hopped on an earlier flight to get home.
From the Daily Beast:
The Daily Beast’s newsletter The Swamp revealed Monday how Cruz was caught touring the Parthenon in Athens, Greece, 24 hours after the Guadalupe River burst its banks, sweeping away dozens of lives in an unspeakable horror whose full effects are still unfolding.
After we published, Cruz’s director of communications issued the claim about his speed of return, adding that the article was “a bull—-piece” that showed “no regard for the tragedy in Texas.” But the Daily Beast has reviewed flight options for Cruz from Athens to San Antonio and discovered several that would have gotten him back sooner than his Sunday return.
Flight data shows multiple flights from Athens to San Antonio, Texas, on Friday, July 4 and Saturday, July 5, after the floods hit.
While it is not known how many seats were available on each flight, possible options included flights leaving Athens on Saturday morning and landing in San Antonio that evening via Chicago, Atlanta, or Washington, D.C.
Earlier flights were also available on Friday once the seriousness of the floods was becoming apparent.
Due to high demand, several airlines also announced this year that Greece would have more direct air connections with the U.S. than it has ever had.
The criticism of Cruz’s response to the disaster in Texas doesn’t end at his ill-timed vacation. In fact, that’s probably the least of it.
Cruz reportedly arrived in Athens on Thursday, just after he helped Senate Republicans pass President Donald Trump’s “big beautiful bill,” which virtually everyone outside of the GOP lawmakers who voted for it has panned as a big, burdensome blunder of a bigly bad bill that will cut food assistance and healthcare from millions of Americans while giving a tax cut to the wealthy.
Apparently, the bill also slashed funding for weather forecasting, and that appears to be Cruz’s idea.
From The Guardian:
The National Weather Service has faced scrutiny in the wake of the disaster after underestimating the amount of rainfall that was dumped upon central Texas, triggering floods that caused the deaths and around $20bn in estimated economic damages. Late-night alerts about the dangerous floods were issued by the service but the timeliness of the response, and coordination with local emergency services, will be reviewed by officials.
But before his Grecian holiday, Cruz ensured a reduction in funding to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (Noaa) efforts to improve future weather forecasting of events that cause the sort of extreme floods that are being worsened by the human-caused climate crisis.
Cruz inserted language into the Republicans’ “big beautiful” reconciliation bill, prior to its signing by Donald Trump on Friday, that eliminates a $150m fund to “accelerate advances and improvements in research, observation systems, modeling, forecasting, assessments, and dissemination of information to the public” around weather forecasting.
A further $50m in Noaa grants to study climate-related impacts on oceans, weather systems and coastal ecosystems was also removed.
But, again, don’t worry, folks, because Cruz is well aware that disasters like these require attention, preparation, and intense scrutiny of protocol — after the fact.
“There’s no doubt afterwards we are going to have a serious retrospective as you do after any disaster and say ‘OK what could be done differently to prevent this disaster?’” Cruz told Fox News. “The fact you have girls asleep in their cabins when flood waters are rising, something went wrong there. We’ve got to fix that and have a better system of warnings to get kids out of harm’s way.”
Yeah — “we” might consider not cutting funding for such systems.
Of course, Cruz and other Republicans are currently wagging their fingers at Democrats and “the left” for politicizing a devastating disaster — as if it only took them all of six months to completely forget how they responded to the wildfires in California — but is it not a political issue when the policies of politicians might have exacerbated what was already bad situation?
Perhaps that’s what Texas residents and MAGA constituents across the country should be asking themselves.
Don’t ask Ted Cruz, though. He’s probably waiting for a hurricane warning to plan his next trip.
