Ted Cruz: Biden’s vaccine mandate a political play to distract from Afghanistan embarrassment

With Biden’s capacity “severely diminished,” his administration is “playing politics” with the vaccine mandate, Senator Cruz said.

By Donna Rachel Edmunds, World Israel News

U.S. President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate on businesses is nothing more than a distraction tactic from the disaster in Afghanistan, and is designed to fail, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) has alleged.

Appearing on Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures, Cruz slammed the Biden administration over the what he called the “worst foreign policy catastrophe in a generation.”

In Afghanistan, the administration “put politics in front of everything else,” he went on. “They abandoned Americans behind enemy lines, and it was a disaster. We were routed there, because Joe Biden surrendered. He fled and left hundreds if not thousands of Americans in harm’s way and we are going to be paying the price – our nation is going to pay the price for our president’s weakness and incompetence for years to come.”

Not only was the pull out of Afghanistan badly mishandled, according to Cruz, now on the offensive the senator went on to accuse the administration of playing politics with the vaccine mandate as a way of clearing the embarrassment of Afghanistan out of the news cycle.

“They want to change the topic from Afghanistan,” the senator said. “It’s why Biden issued this completely illegal and unconstitutional vaccine mandate, because he wanted to change the topic from the disaster in Afghanistan.”

The mandate requires all businesses with more than 100 employees to require their employees to either be vaccinated against COVID-19 or submit to weekly COVID testing. However, despite sending businesses owners into a spin, the cynical tactic is not designed to be implemented in reality, Cruz said; instead, the administration was playing games with businesses for purely political reasons.

“The vaccine mandate is going to be struck down in court. They know that,” he charged. “But the president is defying the law because he wanted the press to start defending him and stop talking about the disasters in Afghanistan. And he’s counting on a bunch of big businesses, in particular, forcing their employees to comply before the matter is ever adjudicated and before the order is struck down.”

The tactic is also making the world less safe, Cruz said, citing the rising threat of Chinese amphibious attacks on Taiwan and evidence that the botched pull out from Afghanistan has emboldened America’s ideological enemies.

“Whether it is Biden himself or the political operatives around him, every decision about Afghanistan and sadly just about every foreign policy and domestic policy that has come before this White House has been decided as a matter of pure politics,” Cruz concluded.

Taking a pop at repeated recent incidences of Biden having his microphone or live feed cut mid-flow by white house staffers, Cruz said the incidences were becoming a ‘disturbing pattern’, adding: “There’s no doubt that President Biden’s capacity is severely diminished and his White House handlers amplify that impression when they keep him locked up in a basement all day long.”