Ted Cruz Reads Green Eggs and Ham, Lessons Republicans Can Learn From Dr. Seuss' Books

The Sneetches is about prejudice and discrimination. In it, there are two varieties of sneetches: those with stars on their bellies, and those without. The star-bellied sneetches raise up their noses at their starless counterparts, excluding them from social activities and generally acting in a bigoted way.

The official stance of the Republican Party, and many of its elected members, is that LGBT Americans don’t deserve the same rights as their straight counterparts. Cruz himself opposed an ordinance in San Antonio that banned discrimination against gay people, and once praised arch-racist Jesse Helms. (That doesn't isn’t even mention the GOP’s nationwide effort on the state level to disenfranchise minority voters.)

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In The Butter Battle Book , Seuss tells us about the Zooks and the Yooks, two cultures similar in most ways except for how they eat toast (the Yooks, you'll recall, prefer the butter-side up; the Zooks somehow put the butter on the bottom). Hostilities between the two groups gradually escalate over this small preferential difference, resulting in an arms race and, ultimately, Mutually Assured Destruction. It’s an amusing parable about the follies of the nuclear arms race and Cold War-style politics in general.

But Cold War-style politics are alive and well in the modern day GOP. During his 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney stated, to much criticism, that Russia was America’s “number one geopolitical foe.” Earlier this month, Cruz said that the U.S. should place anti-ballistic missiles in Eastern Europe in order to show Russia who’s boss, and sell F-16 aircraft to Taiwan in order to intimidate China. “Bullies and tyrants don't respect weakness,” he explained. “We should understand that we don't deal with nations like Russia and China by embracing arm and arm, and signing Kumbaya.” Cruz also once claimed to have a list of 12 Marxists embedded within the Harvard Faculty.

The Lorax can be read as a warning against corporate takeovers or environmental destruction (or both, as the two often go hand in hand). It’s about a man who arrives in a lush, untouched valley, and proceeds to cut down all of the trees in order to manufacture a gimmicky garment product called "thneeds" that “everybody needs.” Soon enough, the skies are polluted, the forest is demolished, and there aren’t enough raw materials left to make more thneeds. In short, everybody loses.

While it's worth noting that Richard Nixon created the Environmental Protection Agency, the modern day Republican party isn’t exactly a steward of the environment. Cruz, along with the rest of his party, is a vocal proponent of the Keystone XL pipeline, and is so blindly supportive of fracking that he doesn’t even want the EPA to study whether it might have any detrimental effects. It’s general party orthodoxy to doubt whether global warming exists, and a lot of them want to do away with the EPA altogether. The Lorax would not approve.

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The Cat In The Hat was written as an antidote to traditional vocabulary books for young readers, which Seuss regarded as asinine and boring. It’s about two kids who, when left alone at home for a day, are confronted by an obnoxious, attention-mongering cat. Uninvited and against the children’s wishes, the titular Cat wreaks all sorts of mayhem in their house. He assures them that no harm will come from his antics, and barely manages to escape before their mother comes home.

Since assuming power in 2010, House Republicans have repeatedly threatened to wreak economic havoc on the country by refusing to raise the debt ceiling. Even conservatives deride this strategy as reckless and irresponsible, and Republicans’ 2011 hostage taking is how we ended up with the sequester. In Seuss’s book, the Cat releases two creatures known as “Thing One” and “Thing Two” to do his bidding. For House Republicans, "Thing One" and "Thing Two" might well be "refuse to raise the debt ceiling" and "obstruct any Obama policy." Much like the Cat, the House GOP always seem to pull back at the last minute, leaving a mess.

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Pro-life activists often appropriate a line from this book (“a person’s a person, no matter how small”) to paint Seuss as an abortion opponent. It’s unclear whether Seuss actually opposed abortion — though the fact that he threatened to sue a pro-life group for using that quote on its stationary would suggest that he wasn’t. More broadly, the book is a story about the importance of protecting marginalized social groups, even when they're not highly visible, or popularly represented.

So, how does the GOP fare when it comes to protecting marginalized groups? Well, when it came time to renew the Violence Against Women Act last year, John Boehner refused to even schedule it for a vote. After the predictable backlash, the House voted on the measure — but insisted on stripping protections for LGBT folk, immigrants, and Native Americans. That wasn’t popular, either, and after a bunch of “Republicans Let Violence Against Women Act Expire” headlines, Boehner reluctantly scheduled it for a vote. With the help of House Democrats, it passed.

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