Ted Cruz picks a fight with conservative reporter and loses

Texas Republican senator Ted Cruz lashed out at a reporter who helped Cruz embarrassed himself — and was promptly smacked down for all to see.

On Monday, Weekly Standard reporter Haley Byrd asked Cruz, in the halls of Congress, if he agreed with Trump that a president can pardon himself.

After an awkward silence of 18 seconds, Cruz finally replied, “That is not a constitutional issue I have studied, so I will withhold judgement at this point.”

Cruz’s embarrassment was deepened when Byrd released audio of the exchange.

Cruz responded hours later by whining on Twitter that “Some dishonest journalists have attacked me for ‘taking 18 seconds’ to answer — without acknowledging that I was walking through the Capitol, late to a meeting, and simply ignoring a question that a reporter had called out at me.”

Cruz continued to make excuses, adding, “When reporters chased me down the hall, and another asked the question again, I chose to answer.”

Byrd, who is a Congressional reporter with the Republican-friendly Weekly Standard, responded Tuesday morning by noting three things: “1. Obviously, the audio speaks for itself. 2. Every reporter who was in that scrum—people who have interacted with Cruz for years—came away from it knowing it was an abnormal response from him. 3. Our story is accurate.”

Cruz was also called out by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, who pointed out that Cruz’s delayed response was a lie. “The real issue that he claimed he hadn’t studied pardon power, which he wrote about decades ago,” Haberman wrote on Twitter.

In fact, Cruz wrote about the pardon powers as recently as 2015, while attacking President Obama over his use of executive authority. And Cruz also proved himself a liar by making detailed arguments about the pardon powers in his midnight Twitter rant.

For someone who has argued in front of the Supreme Court, Cruz makes a startlingly regular habit of getting schooled on constitutional law. Just over a year ago, Cruz tried to pick a fight with former acting attorney general Sally Yates over the constitutionality of Trump’s Muslim ban, and slinked away after she bested him.

Maybe Cruz should give up on constitutional law and try to find something he’s good at.