It's the day after Mitch McConnell shut down Elizabeth Warren's testimony against senator-cum-Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and as it dawns on Republican leaders that preventing a woman senator from reading the verbatim words of a revered civil rights icon might not be great optics, they have a few basic options for responding.

They could double down, feebly justifying their actions with a quote coming soon to a protest sign near you. They could backtrack, acknowledging that when a sitting senator is also a cabinet nominee, the rules that prohibit intra-Senate character attacks immediately become subject to abuse and thus should probably be suspended. Hell, they could even apologize for using this breathtakingly tortured logic to silence their colleague's opposition to a genteel racist taking over enforcement of America’s civil rights laws. (Hahaha, that last one won't happen.)

For Ted Cruz, however, none of these options would quite do. The Texas senator, last seen using his tongue to polish the loafers of a man who campaigned for president by making fun of Cruz's wife, kicked off an interview by complaining at length about Democratic intransigence and noncooperation. It's a particularly rich accusation coming from a man who once read Dr. Seuss on the Senate floor during a phony "filibuster" stunt that even members of his own party found childish. Not even pretending to pay attention to the host’s questions about whether the rules permitted Warren to finish her testimony, Cruz continued:

The charges that she was making against Jeff Sessions are demonstrably false, they’re slanderous, they’re ugly. And its one of the crutches, you know, when the left doesn’t have any other arguments, they accuse everyone of being a racist and it’s an ugly, ugly part of the modern Democratic party. Jeff Sessions is an honorable, decent person.

Ted Cruz is not a stupid man, which makes this logically bankrupt argument all the more infuriating. There is a significant body of evidence that, at the very least, could cause reasonable people—including many of his subordinates-to-be!—to disagree on whether Sessions' record indicates that he is likely to enforce the law in a fair, evenhanded manner. Cruz may not like that evidence, and he may not agree with the conclusion that Sessions is unfit to be Attorney General. But for him to knowingly dismiss well-documented, thoroughly-reported evidence as "party-who-cried-racist nonsense" is disingenuous, even for him.

Hold on to your butts, though, because this is where it gets good: