Updated 3:35 p.m. | The Senate opened Sunday with a reading by the Senate President Pro Tempore Orrin G. Hatch of the Senate’s rules of decorum, in an apparent rebuke of Sen. Ted Cruz calling Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a liar on Friday. And things got more personal from there.
Shortly thereafter, McConnell defended his actions setting up a vote to revive the Export-Import Bank, even though he opposes it — and other top Republicans rebuked Cruz on the floor even as Cruz came to the floor to defend his comments in an extraordinary speech of his own.
Then a back and forth between Hatch, Cruz and Cruz’s senior Texas colleague, Majority Whip John Cornyn, made for an extraordinary sequence.
Hatch went on at length about senators treating each other with respect and not impugning their integrity and maintaining decorum and civility, and, while not specifically calling out Cruz, said too much of what has happened on the Senate floor has been about fundraising and political grandstanding.
“Most egregiously, Mr. President, the Senate floor has even become a place where Senators have singled out colleagues by name to attack them in personal terms and to impugn their character—in blatant disregard of Senate rules, which plainly prohibit such conduct,” Hatch said.
Cruz immediately after Hatch said he agreed with his call for decorum and civility. But, he said, “speaking the truth” is “entirely consistent with civility.”
Cruz’s presidential campaign has sent out a fundraising email from Cruz about the exchange saying he was “betrayed” by the majority leader and urging people to send him a donation.
Later, Cornyn said Cruz was mistaken about McConnell, and implied the majority leader was simply bowing to the will of the Senate, where a clear supermajority backs the Ex-Im Bank. And he warned that Cruz’s effort to overturn the ruling of the chair and get his own amendment made in order would cause chaos and destroy Republicans’ ability to control the schedule.
McConnell himself strongly defended his decision to grease the skids for adding the Ex-Im Bank to the highway bill.
Don't they have to have character in the first place in order to impugn it?
Ohhhhh....so Republicans DO want the corrupt crony bank after all.
Thanks for clearing that up, Cornhole.