CRUZ: 'The Democrats are the party of the Ku Klux Klan'
Gary Cameron/Getty ImagesRepublican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas
Ted Cruz lashed out at the Democratic Party and Sen. Elizabeth Warren for their attempts to block the confirmation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
Speaking on Fox News on Wednesday, the Republican senator from Texas accused Democrats of being "angry and out of their minds" for opposing Sessions, who was confirmed later Wednesday evening.
"They're foaming at the mouth practically," Cruz said on "America's Newsroom."
"It's one of the crutches - when the left doesn't have any other arguments, they go and just accuse everyone of being a racist, and it's an ugly, ugly part of the modern Democratic Party."
The statements came after Warren attempted to recite a 1986 letter written by Coretta Scott King, widow of Martin Luther King Jr., in which King criticized Sessions' track record on civil rights. Republicans on the floor accused Warren of violating Senate rules against impugning another senator, after which a vote to bar her from continuing was upheld.
"Jeff Sessions is an honorable, decent person," Cruz said, before taking aim at the Democratic Party in general.
"The Democrats are the party of the Ku Klux Klan," he said. "The Dixiecrats, they were Democrats who imposed segregation, imposed Jim Crow laws, who founded the Klan. The Klan was founded by a great many Democrats."
"And yet now the Democrats just accuse anyone they disagree with of being a racist."
The Dixiecrats were originally a right-wing Democratic faction that later split after disagreements over the progressive civil rights agenda of the Democratic Party in the late-1940s.