Ted Cruz’s’ Pittsburgh over Paris’ is proof of Republicans’ bad faith

• In response to Biden’s reinstatement in the United States in the Paris climate agreement, GOP Senator Ted Cruz launched a “Pittsburgh over Paris” campaign.
• Cruz says that Biden’s return to the Paris Agreement will cost the citizens of Pittsburgh jobs, but the idea makes no sense and is just another bad faith attempt to score political points.
• That’s the norm for Republicans and a sign of what’s to come.
• This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.
• Visit the Business Insider homepage for more stories.

Even before the ink could dry on Joe Biden’s first batch of executive orders as president, Republicans returned to their bag of obstructive shenanigans.

Mitch McConnell, the leader of the GOP’s new senatorial minority, criticized Biden’s Day One actions, trying to portray them as a wave of radical policies. McConnell said Biden should “remember he doesn’t owe his election to the far left.”

But Biden’s actions reflected the dominant views held by a large section of the American public. And his positions against “Defund the Police,” the unconditional cancellation of student loans and Medicare For All make it clear that Biden is – as he always said – a moderate. McConnell’s complaints are thinly veiled attempts to paint something more liberal than the hardcore GOP policies as “socialism” or “too left”.

Then, Marjorie Taylor Green, QAnon’s friend representative, immediately filed articles of indictment. She published a five second long announcement video say as much. It has something to do with Ukraine, but the impeachment statement frankly didn’t make much sense.

Despite national calls for unity, it took the length of Biden’s inauguration speech before Republicans returned to the bad faith strategy.

Nowhere has this been clearer than with potential 2024 GOP presidential candidate Senator Ted Cruz. In response to Biden’s re-entry into the United States in the Paris Climate Agreement, an international agreement to fight climate change, Cruz launched his own campaign.

It’s called “Pittsburgh over Paris” and it’s a sign of how dumb things are going to get in the Biden era.

Read more: Biden has promised a return to ‘normalcy’, but it’s clear that won’t happen anytime soon.

Here we go again

Black and yellow, the official colors of the NFL Pittsburgh Steelers, and therefore the unofficial colors of Pittsburgh itself, are the colors used in Ted Cruz’s latest 2024 gambit: a “Pittsburgh” bumper sticker over Paris “he gives, illustrated below.

Nothing says “Pittsburgh” like an image that highlights the shape of Texas.

Cruz’s false indignation in the service of the Pittsburghians is a scraper in the head. What does “Pittsburgh over Paris” even mean? Why is trying to limit the adverse effects of climate change harming Pittsburgh? Why choose a city that has in fact set itself ambitious goals to tackle climate change, such as switching to 100% renewable energy in city buildings by 2030?

Cruz says the Paris agreement “will destroy jobs,” presumably in Pittsburgh, but the city overwhelmingly voted for Biden – who has repeatedly promised to revert to the Paris Agreement. Pittsburgh Mayor Bill Peduto said Thursday he agreed with Biden’s decision. County manager Rich Fitzgerald of Allegheny, where Pittsburgh is located, blasted Cruz’s slogan.

“We will do what we need to do here, senator, and keep your nose out of our business,” Fitzgerald told reporters.

Did Ted Cruz choose Pittsburgh because it starts with the same letter as Paris? He did, didn’t he?

All of this is frustrating because Cruz doesn’t care about Pittsburgh. He made this clear when he tried to deprive the city’s largest county, Allegheny, when he not only helped incite an insurgency to reject their votes, but also doubled down on that sentiment of the hours later. Instead, what Cruz is trying to do is create a cultural foundation to run for president in 2024. For this reason, this blow should not be taken seriously.

Cruz’s flippant slogan is not about actual politics or the concerns of Pittsburgh workers (many of whom could likely get stable jobs in green energy if the GOP actually supported investment in the industry), it is a political opportunity. Despite their calls for unity, Republicans are bracing for another round of mischief and mischief. So all this talk about Pittsburgh should be taken with an Allegheny-sized grain of salt.

This is what worries me for the next four years. Biden’s tenure is about to be filled with Republican virtue signals. The Signal of Virtue, or the dishonest expression of moral strength, is the most widely used play in their playbook, which involves pretending to be concerned about the national debt despite the expenses incurred while they are in charge, and to call everything left of Ronald Reagan “radical socialism.”

Cruz is the face of the republican virtue signaling despite his perpetual complaints against this practice. In fact, Cruz’s anti-virtue signaling stance is a virtue signal within a virtue signal – which resembles the plot of Christopher Nolan’s most shady movie possible.

It’s going to be hard for us to get past the days of the Trump administration, given that the then president made headlines for looking directly at the sun during a solar eclipse, among many other things. But given that we’ve already hit critical levels in the early days of the Biden administration, it doesn’t look like it’s getting much better either.