A little known fact about Ted Cruz - he was central to stealing the 2000 election for George Bush

I came across yet another interesting meme and it looks like this:

Until the day that I found this meme, I had read all of the statements in it somewhere before, except for the very last one. Huh? Cruz was the lawyer who helped to steal the election for George W. Bush? I remember seeing pictures of Bush in a motorcade on the way to the White House. I remember seeing the street lined with people who were not celebrating this new president. They were protesting. Estimates put that crowd to be somewhere around 10,000 people.

So, I didn't know that Ted Cruz went that far back in American history, and this fact is not widely publicized or mentioned in the current round of debates. Heck, in all the reading I've done so far on this election until now, no one has even mentioned this one interesting fact. I wanted to know more.

So I did a search and found this article on the same subject from the website of one of the oldest publications in the United States, The Nation. Note the publication date: July 28, 2015. That article is great and well worth the read. But what is really interesting is the network that Cruz was a part of that did the job. From the article:

Ted Cruz, a 29-year-old domestic-policy adviser on the Bush campaign at the time and a former law clerk for Chief Justice William Rehnquist, put together Bush’s legal team. One of his first calls was to John Roberts, whom Cruz knew from the close-knit network of former Rehnquist clerks, nicknamed the Cabal.

Rehnquist was a conservative judge nominated by President Richard Nixon in 1971 and was confirmed by the Senate before taking his seat on the bench in 1972. Note that Ted Cruz was part of a "Cabal" of former Rehnquist clerks that included John Roberts, now Chief Justice at the Supreme Court. Cruz was also central to the team that fought and fought hard to eliminate recounts and to close the polls on time. This despite the many long lines that people faced in that election to vote.

That same article recounts the events leading up to the determination that Bush had won the election. Thousands of people in Florida were disenfranchised from voting through administrative rulings and errors. Jeb Bush was governor at the time, he took no responsibility for what happened and was more than happy to help his brother, but he would sure like to be president now. The number of people disenfranchised was far higher than the margin of error in the recounts that were actually done for the 2000 election. Most of them were African-American and it was estimated that 90% of them would have voted for Al Gore.

Further, the article documents a strenuous effort on the part of the Republican Party to avoid recounts, to limit the number of voters and even to keep the polls closed. If a poll managed to stay open even for an hour longer than normal, some Republicans became enraged. Republicans know that they tend to prevail when voter turnouts are lower. Every dirty trick they could think of was employed to reduce voter turnout since then. They call it, "preventing voter fraud".

Trump looks bad, but Cruz is like going from the pan to the fire. If the election is close, Cruz has helped to ensure that no Democrat will prevail if the battle goes to the Supreme Court. This is why it is so important to win, and win by a wide enough margin that there is no doubt as to the winner. This is why we need a candidate who will motivate the millennials, now the largest demographic of voters. At the moment, that candidate is Bernie Sanders.

We need to employ greater scrutiny to Ted Cruz's participation in the outcome of that fateful election in 2000, long before he has a chance to be nominated. More people need to know that one of the frontrunners of the GOP in this election gave us the Bush presidency that we are paying so dearly for now. Let it be known that Cruz is a measure of just how hard the GOP is willing to fight to win the White House. Let it also be known that the GOP would prefer that most people will go shopping before they ever set foot in a voting booth. Cruz epitomizes this mindset.

All of this begs the question, though. If Republicans are sure that their policies align so well with the will of the people, why not encourage voting rather than discourage it?