As the Treasury Department’s forecast that the U.S. could hit the debt ceiling as soon as June 1 looms over Congress amid its struggles to strike a bipartisan fiscal deal, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has come up with an elegant and productive solution: Question the president’s competence. At a Hill Republican press conference on Wednesday, Cruz took the podium to recall how Biden, as vice president, had helped narrowly avoid a similar default more than a decade ago. “President Joe Biden needs to do the same thing,” the senator said. “And I’ll say, sadly, the reason he hasn’t so far, I believe, is because his mental faculties are too diminished right now to do what he did in 2011, to sit down and actually work together on a solution to the problems.” Instead, Cruz suggested, “what we’re left with is a bunch of young staffers in the White House—radical children—who are perfectly willing to risk a default on the debt because they have no appreciation of the chaos, and misery, and damage a default would do.” The conservative Texan’s remarks come just days after he claimed Biden was “behaving like a terrorist” by refusing to come to the negotiating table with Republicans.