Ted Cruz Ping! If you want on/off this ping list, please let me know.
Please beware, this is a high-volume ping list!
CRUZ or LOSE!
Posted on 07/24/2015 7:52:53 PM PDT by VinL
Senior lawmakers and staff from the House and Senate armed services committees are hammering away on the National Defense Authorization Act, the annual bill that keeps the military up and running. But there are fewer chairs at the negotiating table this time. And committee member and presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) isn’t in one of them.
GOP leadership was worried that the notorious grandstander would tank the crucial spending bill, two sources familiar with the process told HuffPost. In an effort to keep him out of the room, they cut the membership of the conference committee -- the panel responsible for hammering out differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill -- to a smaller number than it’s been in years.
“The number of Senate conferees was cut from previous years. Typically, all members of the [Senate Armed Services Committee] are named as the Senate conferees, but that is not the case this year,” said one congressional source familiar with the process.
Both sources said they were told the conference panel was slashed in an effort to keep Cruz out of the room.
But the motive for boxing Cruz out of the end stages of the NDAA process isn’t entirely clear. After all, bombastic freshman Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) landed an appointment. Cruz voted against the bill when it passed the Senate last month, but so did several other committee members who were eventually appointed to the conference panel.
“You’d have to ask Senator McConnell. That was his decision,” Armed Services Committee Chair John McCain (R-Ariz.) said, adding that the conference process was ongoing.
There’s certainly no love lost between Cruz and Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader. (snip)
(Excerpt) Read more at huffingtonpost.com ...
Ted Cruz Ping! :)
The war is out in the open now for all to see, for the first time in my lifetime.
This in itself is a victory which can only help the good guys.
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