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Good thing our Congress critters don’t have anything important to do; this leaves them all the time in the world to stage ridiculous hateful stunts like this, as Louie Gohmert and Ted Cruz join forces to demand that the Smithsonian Museum remove a bust of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger from the National Portrait Gallery.

And of course, their reasons for this are utterly bogus and dishonest.

Cruz, in a letter drafted with Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, and joined by two dozen House Republicans, tells the gallery’s director that the presence of the bust “is an affront both to basic human decency and the very meaning of justice.” After citing the discredited claim that Planned Parenthood sells fetal tissue for profit, the group then badly twists a Sanger quote, “We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population.”

In Sanger’s letter, which you can find here, she was saying that she wanted black leaders to join her effort to promote birth control access because she was afraid that opponents would disseminate such unfounded rumors, which is ironically exactly what Cruz and Gohmert did with their letter.

While Sanger was a believer in eugenics, so were many leaders of her time, including Winston Churchill. Ironically, Cruz consistently says on the stump that one of his first acts as president would be putting a bust of Churchill in the Oval Office. (The Obama administration’s decision not to hold onto a Churchill bust that the British government had temporarily loaned to George W. Bush has become a frequent point of attack from the Right, despite the fact that there is another Churchill bust still in the White House residence.)

Nevertheless, Cruz and Gohmert go on to say that Sanger’s “racist views have had a very real and devastating impact on the widespread destruction of unborn human life — especially in minority communities.”