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Back in the Bush era, GOP Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi lost his job as Senate majority leader after he remarked that the United States “wouldn’t have had all these problems” with African Americans if only S.C. Sen. Strom Thurmond had been elected president when Thurmond ran on the segregationist Dixiecrat Party ticket in 1948.

But Thurmond, who had turned 100 years old at the time Lott made that career-killing remark — had long ago swung decidedly to the left on civil rights, in part because he needed African-American votes to get elected and possibly because at least one of his children was black.

Back then it fell to North Carolina’s segregationist Sen. Jesse Helms to pick up Thurmond’s mantel. Over the years, Helms availed himself of every opportunity to prove that he was the proudest racist and homophobic member of the Senate.

Earlier this week, Canadian-born Sen. Rafael ‘Ted’ Cruz, the tea party leader who represents Texas, pulled from former Sen. Lott’s playbook and came out with the same sort of high praise for Helms that cost Lott his leadership position a decade or so ago:

CRUZ: But you know there’s another story I heard of Jesse Helms when he first ran.That he opens the mail, and out fell a check for five thousand dollars from John Wayne … [Hems] decided he was going to call him and thank him for for this … And he placed the call and the Duke answered the phone. And and and Jesse Helms said: “Mr. Wayne this this this is Jessie Helms I just wanted to thank you for your tremendous support…”

Apparently Wayne said: “Oh yeah, you’re that guy saying all those crazy things. We need a hundred more like you.”

The willingness to say all of those crazy things is a rare , rare characteristic. And you know what? It’s every bit as true now as it was then, we need a hundred more like Jesse Helms.

The right usually loathes intereference from Hollywood in politics, but when it’s lunkheaded actor sending a few grand to a right-wing bigot, it’s A-OK. And Helms was a self-professed bigot. In fact, in opposing a gay woman for a hig government post, he once said, “If you want to call me a bigot, fine.”

The extent to which he acted on his various hatreds while he was in power would fill volumes, but here, from Mother Jones, are the lowlights of Helms’ record, the sort of vicious, divisive behavior Sen. Cruz would like to see all 100 members of the Senate display:

Helms is perhaps best known for his 1990 “Hands” ad, which helped push him past his Democratic challenger, African-American Charlotte mayor Harvey Gantt. But Helms’ proud bigotry cut much deeper, and with devastating consequences for public policy. Helms believed gays were “weak, morally sick wretches” and argued that “there is not one single case of AIDS in this country that cannot be traced in origin to sodomy”—motivating factors behind his push to block funding for research into HIV at a time when the epidemic was killing tens of thousands of people in the United States alone. He described AIDS education as “so obscene, so revolting, I may throw up.” Jesse Helms was a bad person in a uniquely terrible way that increased pain and suffering for countless individuals. He even opposed appointing lesbians to high-ranking government offices. (Cruz, for his part, criticized a 2012 GOP primary opponent for attending a gay pride parade.)

Helms’ racism was unmatched on Capitol Hill. He got his political start by bashing interracial marriage and accusing the spouse of a political opponent of dancing with a black man. As a senator, he blasted the Civil Rights Act as “the single most dangerous piece of legislation ever introduced in the Congress” and dismissed the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill as “the University of Negroes and Communists.” In 1983, he filibustered the 1983 effort to create a Martin Luther King Jr. national holiday. The infamous “Hands” ad almost felt gratuitous.

And then there’s this: Shortly after Carol Moseley-Braun became only the second African-American since Reconstruction to be elected to the Senate in 1993, she got an elevator with Helms and Utah Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch. Helms began singing the opening lines of “Dixie,” and then he turned to Hatch: “I’m going to make her cry,” Helms said. “I’m going to sing ‘Dixie’ until she cries.”

Here’s one last quote from Helms that Sen. Rafael ‘Ted” Cruz will enjoy: “All Latins are volatile people,” said Helms in 1986,about reaction to a hearing he conducted into corruption in Mexico, “Hence, I was not surprised at the volatile reaction.”

One last unrelated paradox: Cruz — who has made his career opposing the individual mandate in Obamacare — made his remarks in a speech at the Heritage Foundation, the right-wing think tank where the mandate and the system that forces the uninsured to buy private insurance, was invented.

Rough Transcript