MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough tore into Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) for claiming on Thursday, during a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee, that a ban on assault weapons is unconstitutional, calling the argument ignorant and asking if the Harvard-educated lawmaker is illiterate.

Cruz made the comments moments before the Senate committee advanced Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s (D-CA) proposed ban on military-style weapons to the full Senate and rudely lectured Feinstein on Second Amendment jurisprudence, likening restrictions on guns to censoring books under the First Amendment.

On Friday, the Morning Joe host explained that Cruz’s argument misinterpreted “what the Second Amendment says and what Scalia, Thomas, and the conservative court said in 2008 about what the Second Amendment is and what it is not”:

SCARBOROUGH: Did they teach Ted Cruz to read what the Supreme Court said? Especially in the landmark, the landmark decision regarding Second Amendment rights over 200 years was written in 2008? I’m just wondering why would he use his seat on the Judiciary Committee if he went to Harvard to — to — to put forward a willfully ignorant statement about this bill violating the Second Amendment, because it does not. And Ted Cruz knows it does not. So who is he playing for? Is he playing for — for — for people who can’t read, for illiterates? I don’t understand…. When you’re condescending and you don’t even have the facts right. When you’re misstating what the Second Amendment says as interpreted by the conservative court, by Scalia. I have a problem with that.

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Indeed, to quote Justice Scalia’s decision in the landmark 2008 case District of Columbia v. Heller, “nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.” The ruling also allows limitations on ownership of “dangerous and unusual” weapons that are not in “common use” — like, for example, assault weapons.

A third measure to reform gun violence prevention passed the Senate Judiciary Committee Thursday along party lines, but not without bitter opposition from Republicans, who claimed that such a ban would violate the Second Amendment and analogized restrictions on guns to censoring books under the First Amendment.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) battered Democrats with questions about whether they would support restrictions on the First or Fourth Amendments he claimed were similar to those an assault weapons ban would impose on the Second:

I pose to the senator from California [Sen. Diane Feinstein], would she deem it consistent with the Bill of Rights for Congress to engage in the same endeavor that we are contemplating doing with the Second Amendment in the context of the First or Fourth Amendment, namely, would she consider it constitutional for congress to specify that the first amendment shall apply only to the following books and shall not apply to the books that congress has deemed outside the protection of the Bill of Rights?

But Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) obliterated his argument by noting the analogous actual restrictions on the actual First Amendment:

In reference to the question my colleague from Texas asked, would you limit books? Would you name specific books? Yeah. It’s constitutional within the ambit of the First Amendment to eliminate child pornography. And we have lots of laws that are very explicit about that. Very explicit. That are constitutional, that have been upheld as constitutional. Similarly, you can’t falsely scream fire in a crowded theater. Similarly, we have libel laws. Every one of these is an impingement on the sacred First Amendment, upheld as constitutional. There are reasonable limits on each amendment, and I think it is anomalous, to put it kindly, for either side to interpret one amendment so expansively and another amendment so narrowly that it just doesn’t add up because your interpretation of the Constitution should be consistent.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) then dealt the final blow with a direct comparison between First and Second Amendment restrictions both intended to protect public safety:

It is hard to imagine that it would be a violation of the First Amendment for somebody to yell fire in a crowded theater but it’s not a violation of the Second Amendment to prevent somebody from bringing a hundred-round magazine into a crowded theater in a Aurora, Colorado.

Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) made a different constitutional argument, noting “we’ve heard testimony there are some 4 million weapons” banned by the bill. He cited the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2008 opinion in D.C. v. Heller to assert that that 4 million weapons necessarily “qualifies as common use” as defined by the decision and “cannot be banned.”

While Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion did strike down a ban on weapons in “common use,” he specifically stated that the Constitution allows bans on “dangerous and unusual” weapons. Lee failed to explain how the fact that manufacturers of “dangerous and unusual” weapons have manufactured so many has any bearing  on whether are not they meet the definition of “in common use.”

Whitehouse lamented the “clear” intractable Republican opposition to the assault weapons ban and suggested that a separate vote on the high-capacity magazines element of the bill would have more success in passing the Senate. The Senate judiciary Committee has already approved measures to expand background checks and reduce gun trafficking, but they all face significant obstacles in both the full Senate and the House.

Recently, it came to light that Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) suggested that roughly a dozen professors at Harvard Law “would say they were Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.” Through a spokesman, Cruz doubled down on these comments, saying “Senator Cruz’s substantive point was absolutely correct: in the mid-1990s, the Harvard Law School faculty included numerous self-described proponents of ‘critical legal studies’ — a school of thought explicitly derived from Marxism – and they far outnumbered Republicans.”

Not only is Cruz’s follow-up not a defense of his original statement, but it’s wrong in and of itself. Critical Legal Studies (CLS) isn’t “derived from Marxism;”although the movement was influenced by some Marxist ideas, it’s explicitly designed to be a critique of Marxist approaches to the law rather than an extension of them.

First, it’s important to understand how CLS thinkers actually define their own beliefs — remember, Cruz said that they themseves “would say” that they were revolutionary Marxists. ThinkProgress reached out to Georgetown University law professor Louis Michael Seidman, a leading “crit” (the term CLS exponents use for themselves). Here’s what Seidman told us:

I don’t have anything that’s not obvious to say about Cruz’s disgusting comments. A lot of early crit work was designed to refute Marxist theories of law, although some crits were also influenced by Marx. I know of no crit who thought of himself as a communist or who supported the regimes in the Soviet Union or China.

A 1992 article by crit Richard Michael Fischl backs up Seidman. As if anticipating Cruz, he wrote “Those of us associated with cls think it grossly unjust when our critics make an analytically identical move and argue that Stalinist totalitarianism is the ‘best worked-out, most consummated’ version of our position — in the face of the fact that a common intellectual thread that ties together virtually all cls work is its rejection of the authoritarianism and vulgar determinism suggested by the Stalinist label.”

So it’s clear enough: crits aren’t revolutionary Marxists. But Seidman’s suggestion that CLS “was designed to refute Marxist theories” implies that even Cruz’ spokesperson’s reformulation was inaccurate: far from being “explicitly derived” from Marxism, CLS was explicitly seen as a critique of Marxist thought. So not only did Cruz get it wrong, but in a certain sense he got it backwards.

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During the confirmation hearing for Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE), Sen. Ted Cruz engaged in guilt-by-association tactics that reminded several observers (including this author) of former Sen. Joseph McCarthy (R-WI)’s baseless claim to have “a list” of Communists who had infiltrated the U.S. State Department.

It turns out Cruz was even more like McCarthy than previously thought. He believes that “Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government” have infiltrated the Harvard Law School faculty, outgunning the embattled campus conservatives.

Cruz’s Communist comments came in a speech to the Koch-supported group Americans for Prosperity unearthed by The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer. Mayer attended the speech, and wrote down the text of Cruz’ McCarthyite allegations, which also linked President Obama to the so-called revolutionary Marxists at Harvard:

Cruz greeted the audience jovially, but soon launched an impassioned attack on President Obama, whom he described as “the most radical” President “ever to occupy the Oval Office.” (I was covering the conference and kept the notes.)

He then went on to assert that Obama, who attended Harvard Law School four years ahead of him, “would have made a perfect president of Harvard Law School.” The reason, said Cruz, was that, “There were fewer declared Republicans in the faculty when we were there than Communists! There was one Republican. But there were twelve who would say they were Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.”

Like McCarthy, Cruz doesn’t name names, and that’s no surprise. As Mayer notes, “Under the Smith Act, it is a crime to actively engage in any organization pursuing the overthrow of the U.S. government.” So Cruz’s allegation could potentially mean he’s accusing a large chunk of the Harvard faculty of engaging in a federal felony.

It’s also extremely unlikely that there were any truly revolutionary Marxists at Harvard. The intellectual cohort Mayer guesses he was pointing to are advocates of Critical Legal Studies (CLS), an intellectual movement with strong roots at Harvard Law. CLS scholars argue that law and legal texts are indeterminate; in greatly simplified terms, that the law can be interpreted in basically whatever fashion judges choose. Taking after a long tradition of leftist thought (including Marx himself), CLS advocates argue that the fact of legal indeterminacy means law ends up reflecting the will and the interests of the powerful (principally rich, white men) rather than neutral adjucations of the principles that are supposed to underpin the law. A more comprehensive introduction, from Harvard Law Professor Roberto Unger, can be found here.

It’s true that this is an extremely left-wing analysis of the way that law works, but that doesn’t mean they actually wanted the Soviets to win the Cold War by overthrowing the US government, as Cruz said. Indeed, as Mayer notes, perhaps the most famous CLS exponent at Harvard, Duncan Kennedy, identifies as a “social democrat,” not a Communist and certainly not a revolutionary Soviet.

A majority of the Supreme Court’s conservative bloc attended Harvard Law School. No Marxists (that ThinkProgress is aware of) from Harvard have ascended to the Supreme Court.

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) cherry picked data and misled the public about gun research in a Senate Judiciary hearing on Tuesday, painting a picture of America’s gun problem entirely at odds with reality. Cruz made two false arguments when questioning US Attorney Tim Heaphy — first, that gun regulations resulted in higher crime rates in American cities; second, that there was no empirical evidence that gun law reform would reduce crime:

CRUZ: San Antonio has 7 murders per 100,000 people. Austin has four murders per 100,00 people. El Paso has two murders per 100,000 people. That means Detroit, the murder rate is 24 times higher than it is in El Paso…None of those cities I discussed, Houston, Austin, San Antonio, El Paso, are isolated islands. Indeed, in the entire state [of Texas] you can purchase firearms and what we see with the murder rates is that the murder rates are consistently lower. My question to you, is not your subjective beliefs, but are you aware of any empirical data — every one of us wants to reduce murder rates — my question to you is there any basis to say that stripping the constitutional rights of law-abiding citizens would result in decreasing murder rates rather than increasing them which, unfortunately, is the pattern I think we’ve seen.

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State level data contradicts Cruz’s assertion. The two states with the highest per capita murder rates in 2011, Louisiana and Mississippi, received F ratings from the pro-reform Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence (the third highest, South Carolina, has a D-). Louisiana and Mississippi don’t require background checks on private sales, demand that firearm dealers acquire licenses in order to sell guns legally, or limit the number of guns any one person can purchase at once.

Moreover, there are many factors that go into total homicide rates beyond gun laws, like lead saturation or gang violence) in addition to gun laws. Indeed, a recent crime spike in Chicago (one of Cruz’s examples of places with firearm regulation and high rates of death) predated gun regulations, indicating that the cause of the recent increase in violence isn’t the result of a change in gun laws.

So the question isn’t simply whether we can point to cities or states with lax gun regulation that have higher gun murder rates than those that don’t; it’s whether stricter regulations in any given city would reduce that particular city’s homicide rate relative to its current baseline. That’s something that’s best tested by empirical evidence that takes into account confounding factors.

And this systematic evidence suggests that gun regulations save live and that there is no real proof for Cruz’s suggestion that more guns lead to less crime. Three papers that studied homicides by county found that, when you control for factors like poverty, counties with more guns have more gun deaths. Another study found that, at the state level, stronger gun regulations are reasonably well correlated with fewer gun deaths. And research comparing the United States to other countries found that America’s greater access to guns contributes to higher murder rates.