Seriously folks there is middle ground between supporting establishment RINOs and putting crowns on the heads of whatever amateur screams the loudest that they are King or Queen of the Tea party.
Posted on 02/05/2013 6:37:33 AM PST by SeekAndFind
Ted Cruz (R., Texas) has been a United States senator for only 34 days, but already he is making his mark on national politics. His conspicuous presence and aggressive tone have thrilled his conservative cheerleaders, while inducing fits of rage in liberal detractors and Joe Scarborough.
In the past week alone, Cruz has tangled with veteran Democratic spin-master Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) on Meet the Press, sent a tongue-in-cheek letter to Mayor Rahm Emanuel of Chicago, introduced legislation to fully repeal Obamacare, and recorded “no” votes on major items, including Hurricane Sandy relief, raising the debt ceiling, filibuster reform, and the confirmation of John Kerry for secretary of state. He also made headlines with his aggressive interrogation of prospective defense secretary Chuck Hagel.
Additionally, Cruz’s quick rise to prominence appears to have offended the sensibilities of the political press. During Hagel’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee last week, I overheard multiple groans from other journalists covering the event whenever Cruz began a pointed line of questioning. On Twitter, they noted their exasperation in more colorful ways.
If anything, the 41-year-old Texan has made clear he does not intend to abide by the conventional playbook for new members: Keep your head down, keep your mouth shut, and learn the ropes before inserting yourself into the national conversation.
That’s not Cruz’s style. More important, it’s not what he campaigned on. “If I go to Washington and just have a good voting record, I will consider myself a failure,” then-candidate Cruz said on the campaign trail in 2012. Last week, in an interview with conservative radio host Mark Levin, Cruz expressed disbelief at “how shocked people are when you actually do what you said you would do.” “In most of America that’s to be expected, and yet oddly enough in Washington, D.C., that seems to be unusual,” he said.
Republicans are delighted that Cruz, whom many regard as a skilled advocate for conservatism, has decided to play such an active role right off the bat. “Any member who has a point of view on a topic should not feel shy about expressing that,” says one Republican Senate aide. “For someone as talented as Ted Cruz, it’s vital that we have eloquent conservatives out there arguing for our side.”
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.) sang Cruz’s praises in an interview with National Review Online, calling the freshman senator “one of the smartest, most articulate guys you’ll ever meet.” “He’s ready for prime time on day one, which is pretty unusual for somebody who just got sworn in,” McConnell says. “He’s a deadly weapon.” He is also “good company,” according to McConnell, who recently accompanied Cruz on a delegation to Israel and Afghanistan.
Republican leaders have already sought to deploy Cruz’s talents in critical areas. In addition to being tapped for coveted slots on the Judiciary and Armed Services Committees, Cruz was named vice chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, where he is likely to play a key role in selecting and advising candidates in the 2014 midterm election.
Senate conservatives are similarly pleased to count Cruz among their ranks. “For the forces of those who favor limited government, Senator Cruz is a powerful addition,” says a conservative GOP Senate aide. “Based on our numbers, and the youth of many of these members, we’re going to have a much stronger voice in the public debate.”
Cruz may consider a solid conservative voting record to be a meaningless metric for success, but he has already established one for himself. The Washington Times noted that Cruz has been on the losing end of all eleven votes he has taken so far this year, a record the Texan is perfectly content with.
For example, he voted against the $50 billion Sandy-relief bill, which he decried as a pork-laden mistake. “Hurricane Sandy inflicted devastating damage on the East Coast, and Congress appropriately responded with hurricane relief,” he said in a statement. “Unfortunately, cynical politicians in Washington could not resist loading up this relief bill with billions in new spending utterly unrelated to Sandy.”
He was one of only three senators to vote against John Kerry’s confirmation to be the next secretary of state, citing the Massachusetts Democrat’s “longstanding less-than-vigorous defense of U.S. national-security issues and, in particular, his long record of supporting treaties and international tribunals that have undermined U.S. sovereignty.”
Cruz was also one of the first Republican lawmakers to voice skepticism about the Senate framework on immigration reform, citing “deep concerns” about the proposed pathway to citizenship. “To allow those who came here illegally to be placed on such a path is both inconsistent with rule of law and profoundly unfair to the millions of legal immigrants who waited years, if not decades, to come to America legally,” he said.
Cruz’s position has put him at odds with Senator Marco Rubio (R., Fla.), who helped draft the framework. The political relationship between the two Hispanic Republicans will certainly be something to watch over the coming months.
Cruz has sought to shape the political discourse in other ways, beyond the confines of Capitol Hill. Last week, he issued a colorful retort to Mayor Rahm Emanuel’s call for mass-scale divestment from firearms manufacturers.
Cruz sent a letter to the CEOs of gun makers Smith & Wesson and Sturm, Ruger & Co, as well as to leaders of Bank of America and TD Bank, financial institutions that Emanuel specifically urged to cease their relationships with the firearms companies. He slammed the mayor’s actions and urged the companies to bring their business to his home state.
“In Texas, we have a more modest view of government,” Cruz wrote. “We do not accept the notion that government officials should behave as bullies, trying to harass or pressure private companies into enlisting in a political lobbying campaign.”
Matt Mackowiak, a Texas-based Republican consultant, praises Cruz as “someone who really understands the outside game,” who spends his weekends “aggressively” traveling the state and meeting with constituents and grassroots organizations. It’s only a matter of time, Mackowiak says, before Cruz masters the inside game and “starts to have a real impact.”
Cruz supporters see him as a natural heir to former senator and soon-to-be Heritage Foundation president Jim DeMint (R., S.C.), one of Cruz’s earliest backers. “DeMint changed the whole paradigm in the Senate, shook it up in way that you can be a freshman and have a national profile and be aggressive and still be effective,” Mackowiak says.
Like DeMint, Cruz has already become a favorite target of the establishment press. The New York Times penned an editorial on January 20 urging Republican leaders to “marginalize lawmakers like Mr. Cruz,” which began: “Ted Cruz, the newly elected Tea Party senator from Texas, embodies the rigidity the public grew to loathe in Congress’s last term.”
The mainstream press was particularly incensed by last week’s Hagel hearing, where Cruz pressed Hagel to explain remarks he made in a 2009 appearance on Al Jazeera. The senator’s staff had rolled a big-screen television into the hearing room to play clips of the appearance, in which Hagel concurred with a number of controversial statements from Al Jazeera viewers — that the United States is “the world’s bully,” and that Israel has been (referring to a specific past event) complicit in a “sickening slaughter.”
Cruz’s blunt approach, and perhaps unorthodox tactics, became a lightning rod for liberal critics, especially after many of them had all but given up defending Hagel, whose performance was widely panned on both sides. Cruz was derided for his “bogus attack” on Hagel, for “hectoring” the nominee, for turning the hearing “into a clown show,” and even for channeling the spirit of Joe McCarthy.
For conservatives, that may be one of the surest signs that Cruz is doing something right.
— Andrew Stiles is a political reporter for National Review.
In my world, you help those who are in positions capable of supporting one’s favorite causes. Supporting those who demonstrate their beliefs are true and those who are not likely to fall into the political machine and lose themselves, should be important. Each of these you lambaste, including Cruz, fit that criteria. However, Cruz won in a conservative state, and for this, you are proud to say you support him.
If the person can win their state's primary, that already helps prove they have much of the capacity to win in the general election. That should be enough for most.
Unless one can get in “sickoflibs” time machine. Then you can be assured of only helping "winners".
I'm “sickofRINOs.”
IF you supported them at some time before their loss that is one thing.
But your defending them afterward is another, it means you either cant accept reality and learn from your mistakes or you are a covert Dem paid by MSNBC to help Dems win elections.
And if you EVER defend a loser you voted for, I’ll remind you that “you are a covert Dem paid by MSNBC to help Dems win elections,” as well.
Paging Karl Rove, Karl Rove please pick up the courtesy phone.
I proudly voted for him.
Boehner shines? Who knew?
I could deal with a Rubio/Cruz ticket. Does that make me racist against whites?
I could deal with a Rubio/Cruz ticket. Does that make me racist against whites?
We need a bench with people just like Cruz - conservative, but politically savvy.
If I defend some loser who threw away the election for no good reason and helped keep the power at the national election in Dems hands then I would deserve it.
Those three took easy wins and threw them away for nothing.
There is no rational defense of them.
Sickoflibs is basically right. I'll cut Angle a little slack because she was a political neophyte. Akin and Mourdock were not. They blew easy election wins because they provided the jaw-droppingly stupid sound byte to allow the RAT b*st*rds to make the election about abortions for rape exceptions.
I have a hard time believing they could possibly be that dense. I find it easier to believe they were paid to take a dive.
Was his father a US citizen when Cruz was born?
****************
His father didn’t become a US citizen until 2005 according to the following.
snip
Cruz brags about how his Cuban father fought with rebels supporting Fidel Castro against dictator Fulgencio Batista in the 1950s, before Castro announced that he was a communist. Rafael Cruz fled the country and graduated from the University of Texas at Austin, then moved to Canada to work in the oil fields near Alberta, where Ted Cruz was born. The family eventually moved to Houston, and his father became a U.S. citizen in 2005.
An answer you might get to that here is ‘Well we should have made the election about rape exceptions as that is the #1 issue facing this country’.
My answer to that is that they trivialized life based social issues by handing Dems a reality commercial (of them) showing that so-cons dont even know the basic biology of a female’s reproductive systems, and completely nuked ‘their own’ prolife cause and made those who champion it the laughing stock of the country by becoming a caricature of them.
so-cons should despise them more than anyone Else rather than defend them.
So she asks me "Cant they tie him up till they are rescued??"
Of course, I have the sense not to talk about men's fashion tips.
Since I grew up on a farm and my Dad was a veterinarian, I probably know a lot about female reproductive systems. If you can get past the sheer stupidity of the context of Akin and Mourdock's comments, what they said was even mostly correct. There was a popular statistic tossed around at the time that fully one-third of rapes resulted in pregnancies. That's pure bull hockey, because if it were true, and consensual intercourse resulted in about the same rate (it is actually higher for reasons discussed at that time back in August), then Mrs. Vigilanteman should have been pregnant close to 1000 times, rather than three times.
None of this is the point. These nimrods lost the argument, lost the election and did untold damage to other GOP candidates the moment they allowed themselves to be dragged into that swamp. It was 1000 times worse than George Allen's infamous maccaca moment.
Thank you.
Seriously folks there is middle ground between supporting establishment RINOs and putting crowns on the heads of whatever amateur screams the loudest that they are King or Queen of the Tea party.
Akin was my pick in that primary. A FRiend was warning he was not ready for prime time. I argued about him with it “why isn’t Akin a first tier candidate?” but he turned out to be right.
He flat out cost us a seat by refusing to quit after he was no longer viable (the reason why he couldn’t win is irrelevant, he couldn’t win so he should’ve quit, he could have had a future, now his career is an elected official is over)
Those of in the know warned about Angle because of her history of losing races. Like when she lost a GOP House primary and whined for a re-vote (not a recount). Sue Lowden or Danny Tarkainian would be in the Senate right now. But Angle conned enough people for her to win the primary.
Mourdock is different cause he was running against an elderly RINO incumbent and as a twice elected State Treasurer who would have thought he’d run such a lousy race? Very disappointing.
he was no longer viable because the Vichy GOPe joined the leftwing media against him.
I seriously have nothing but pure disdain for the Vichy GOPe at this point.
I disagree, his gaffe turned enough voters against him that Mitt Romney and the entire party could have jumped to his defense and it wouldn’t have helped.
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