Seriously? Does FR have amnesia? Why the sudden turn on Cruz?
1) He shut down the Senate (with a filibuster) for its failure to manage spending. This led to a government shutdown, which we all applauded at the time, and the GOP took the Senate in the next election because Cruz was the only one to show that the GOP was serious about stopping the Democrats. Without this, no one would believe the GOP had any intention of doing anything.
2) He has called out the GOP leadership by name and put them on notice... and on the news. This has led to the GOP having to take him seriously and at least give lip-service to conservatives rather than their preferred method of ignoring them.
3) He had only one bill that was passed by both houses and signed by Obama--but it was a good one. Again, this occurred because he can't be ignored. In April 2014, Cruz introduced legislation to prevent representatives to the United Nations who are believed to be spies or terrorists from entering the country. It was approved unanimously by the House and Senate, and signed into law only weeks after having been introduced.
4) He isn't a do-nothing Senator... In the 113th Congress, Cruz introduced 25 bills, and he’s put forth another 10 so far in the current session. The 25 he introduced last session put him near the middle of the pack of Senate Republicans. He ranked 18th out of the 45 Republicans in the last Senate for most bills introduced.
Of the 25 bills Cruz introduced in the 113th Congress, only two made it through the Senate. However, only three Republican Senators in the last Congress got more than two bills through the upper chamber, making Cruz the fourth most successful in his party.
5) Cruz has a history of breaking with GOP leadership on votes, although it’s not as extreme as one might suppose. In 684 votes spanning his entire time in the Senate, Cruz has bucked party leadership 73 times. The GOPe doesn't do ALL bad things... but when they do, Cruz opposes them.
6) Cruz has given 217 speeches on the floor of the Senate. The last four speeches Cruz gave on the Senate floor came in January in support of a bill to authorize the Keystone XL oil sands pipeline. The 213 floor speeches Cruz gave over the course of the 113th Congress ranked him as the fifth most active Senate floor speaker.
Cruz has trumpeted his high-profile opposition to Democratic initiatives in Congress. “What we’ve accomplished over and over again in many instances is stopping bad things from happening,†Cruz said.
I want him to have real authority to keep doing what is right.
Your whole post is longer than what he supposedly “accomplished”.
The tl;dr
99% defeats. He said McConnell was a liar, led a brief and worthless filibuster, and got one bill passed that required literally NO EFFORT.
Oh yeah, he gave a lot of speeches.
Wooooooooo! Got a regular John C. Calhoun here, folks!
The reason why no one remembers it is because it is forgettable.
And if that was Rubio’s record, I’ll doubt you would be waving it around like it was going out of style.
The one bill Cruz passed was fine, but essentially window dressing because it was noncontroversial. Rubio’s bill that killed the Obamacare risk corrider subsidy program was big, and looming even bigger now that more and more insurance companies are announcing losses due to Obamacare.