WASHINGTON, D.C. — “Orbiting is nine-tenths of possessing, and possession is nine-tenths of the law,” was how Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) began his press conference earlier this week. Cruz was acting in his official capacity as the chairman of the Senate space exploration committee. A NASA satellite has begun orbiting a dwarf planet called Ceres, and Cruz alongside fellow Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK), have big plans for the little planet. “Finders keepers, losers weepers is as important a paradigm of American values as is ‘liberty or death’ or ‘corporations are people too, my friend,’ and guess what? We found Ceres first, so we get to keep it,” said Cruz to the assembled reporters.
Cruz told reporters that he intends to start proceedings that would claim Ceres as the rightful property of the United States of America, even though the U.S. is one of hundreds of nations on Earth, and despite the fact that no human has ever walked on Ceres, and likely wouldn’t be able to for decades. “When we answered the call of Manifest Destiny and gently nudged the native people into holding pens — er I mean reservations — we weren’t thinking about whether or not we had a rightful claim to the land,” Cruz told the press. “We just took what we wanted, and didn’t take ‘please stop murdering us and giving us your diseased blankets’ for an answer,” the Texas Senator told his audience.
One of Cruz’s fellow Republicans is extremely supportive of his attempts to claim Ceres as his own. “Hell, I don’t just think we should claim it,” Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-OK) told reporters as he exited a D.C. area gun range, “I think we should frack the darn thing.” Inhofe of course has already made his feelings known about fracking here at home, having recently mulled over the idea of fracking the Grand Canyon. He also made headlines when he threw a snowball on the floor of the Senate to disprove climate change, and when we then took to the floor again to jump up and down so that he could “disprove” gravity as well. “If God hadn’t intended us to frack not just our world but every world He sees fit to put in our path, then he wouldn’t have given us the technology to frack in the first frackin’ place, would he have,” asked Inhofe rhetorically.
Reporters asked Inhofe if he knew whether conventional fracking technologies would even work on Ceres. They asked Inhofe how he planned to get the fracking materials down to the surface of Ceres, and they asked if he had any idea what the surface of the dwarf planet was even composed of. “I don’t quite know what the surface is made of right now,” Inhofe answered, “but I do know what it’ll be made of once we plant our flag up there — liberty, justice, and freedom.”
At his own press conference, Cruz was asked about Inhofe’s fracking idea. “Well, I haven’t read the gentleman from Oklahoma’s proposal yet, but generally I am okay with anything that angers the elitist, eggheads in academia,” said the man who graduated from a prestigious Ivy League law school. “One thing we know for certain is that climate change is not unanimously held as reality in the scientific community even. Did you know that roughly 3 out of every 100 scientists is skeptical about climate change,” Cruz asked the media. “That’s hardly what I’d call unanimous! That’s a full 3% of scientists who don’t believe climate change is real or that humankind has had anything to do with it. So you know what? Yeah, let’s frack the living bejesus out of every planet, I say.”
“This is the exact kind of bold leadership Americans want out of the Republican-controlled Congress,” said Senate Majority Mitch McConnell when he was asked about Inhofe and Cruz’s plans for Ceres. “Americans, real Americans now, understand that we were given a divine purpose — to be America and to have whatever it is we want because of freedom.” McConnell said he “fully supports” any efforts to “secure our future by destroying everything we come into contact with for profit” because “America is fueled by a dogmatic worship of the almighty dollar,” said McConnell, “and it’s in the pursuit of more dollars that we feel the hand of God most.”
“Look, I’m not a scientist,” Inhofe told reporters at his press conference. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t know more about science than they do, does it? Just because scientists have spent years and years of their lives studying these very complex ideas that doesn’t mean I can’t come in like a bull in a china shop, spit demands at them, mock them mercilessly as being elitists, and then support things that fly completely in the face of their well-documented, peer-reviewed data.” Inhofe paused, “Bottom line? They didn’t put me in charge of the environment and public works committee so I’d kowtow to environmental scientists. They put me in charge to kick some ass. God bless America, God bless the free markets, and God bless the Republican Party!”
