Welcome. It is verdict with Ted Cruz. Ben Ferguson with you as well today. So nice to have you with us. Senator,

I know you're really excited about this idea that was put out there a couple days ago. Entitled in the Atlantic,

let's declare a pandemic amnesty and let's focus on the future and fix the problems that we still

need to solve. I'm not buying it. I'm not going forward. Maybe you want to do this, but I say,

uh-uh. I have two words in response. Hell no. Look, this is, you know, a leftist writing this article saying, let's just

forgive and forget everything that happened on COVID. It's all okay now. And it actually,

that article in turn was then tweeted out by Randy Weingarten, who is the, you know, the head of one

of the big teachers unions. and she said, I agree.

We ought to have a COVID amnesty. And basically what she's saying is, okay, look, my policies

were an absolute disaster. They hurt tens of millions of kids because I was a shameless partisan

hack. I got Democrats and the Biden White House to

support school closures for over a year. We now have national reading scores. We now have

national writing school or math scores that our kids' scores have plummeted because Democrats shut down schools, because the teachers' union and Randy

Weingarten in particular pushed it. We also know that the racial gap, the gap on test scores between black kids and white kids grew by the largest amount in the last year of

any time in history. All of that was predictable, and it wasn't just predictable, it was predicted.

Many of us, myself included, were screaming from the mountaintops when this was happening.

Last year in the middle of the school shutdowns,

I forced vote after vote after vote to try to stop it.

I forced a vote on the Senate floor to cut off new funds to schools if they were still shut down.

Every single Democrat voted no.

Just a couple of months ago, I forced to vote on the Senate floor to stop the District of Columbia

schools from enforcing a COVID vaccine mandate, which would result in throwing out of school

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