Posted on 10/09/2014 3:31:04 PM PDT by jazusamo
WICHITA, Kan. — Tea Party favorite Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) waded into the Kansas Senate race Thursday, touting beleaguered Republican incumbent Pat Roberts as the contest’s only true conservative.
The conservative hero's support is crucial as Roberts tries to energize his campaign and ward off a challenge from well-funded independent Greg Orman in a race that could jeopardize the GOP's hopes of winning Senate control.
Cruz vouched for Roberts despite raising money earlier in the cycle for the Madison Project, a conservative group that supported Roberts’s primary challenger Milton Wolf. Wolf has not yet endorsed Roberts in the general election.
Cruz, however, offered full-throated support of Roberts as a dependable conservative during a boisterous rally at the Wichita Area Builders Association. “I’m here in Kansas because I know Pat Roberts. The two years I’ve served in the Senate, over and over again on fight after fight on conservative principles, Pat Roberts has stood up and reported for duty,” he said.
Cruz noted that when he waged a 21-hour filibuster to protest ObamaCare last year, Roberts was one of only a handful of senators who came to the floor to support him. Roberts, standing next to Cruz behind the podium, reminisced about a Senate attendant reminding him to put on a tie before speaking on the floor in the early hours.
Cruz said Roberts also joined his opposition to legislation supported by some Republicans such as Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) to expand gun background checks and his fight against comprehensive immigration reform passed by the Senate.
“When Barack Obama responded to the crisis at the border by proposing yet more lawless amnesty, Pat Roberts stood side by side with me fighting to end President Obama’s amnesty,” he said.
Cruz acknowledged that Roberts emerged this summer from a nasty primary against a challenger backed by several Tea Party groups, but he urged unity.
“That primary is over, and I want to speak to folks who are frustrated with Washington,” he said. “If you’re frustrated with Washington, the answer is not to stay home and keep Harry Reid as majority leader.”
Retiring Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), another conservative popular among Tea Party voters, joined the event to trumpet Roberts’s fiscal credentials.
“I thank God every day he’s in the Senate,” he said.
The event kicked off a four-day bus tour Roberts will take across Kansas.
Reid, the Senate majority leader from Nevada, was a main talking point at the event, just as he has been throughout the race. Roberts consistently argues that a vote for Orman is a vote for the Democratic majority.
The wealthy businessman, who backed Obama in 2008 and GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney in 2012, has declined to say whether he will caucus with the Democrats or the Republicans if elected.
Cruz slammed Orman as a Democrat masquerading as an independent.
“You see a person who’s cut a check to Barack Obama, to Hillary Clinton and Harry Reid, who tells you he’s independent,” he said, noting the Senate's two independent members, Sens. Bernie Sanders (Vt.) and Angus King (Maine) caucus with Democrats.
He compared Orman to Obama, who ran for president in 2008 as a bipartisan problem-solver who wanted to fix a broken political system in Washington.
“He called him a candidate pretending not to be a liberal Democrat,” he said.
Orman argues he also gave money to Sen. Scott Brown’s (R-Mass.) successful 2010 campaign, which stripped Democrats of a 60-seat Senate majority.
Some conservatives who attended the rally, however, said they would only support Roberts if he received an endorsement from Wolf.
Ollie Angell, a retired engineer from Wichita, and his wife, Lois, said Roberts would earn their backing only if he adopted Wolf’s position in favor of shutting down the IRS and implementing a consumption tax.
There are signs, still, that other conservatives are beginning to coalesce behind Roberts.
A CNN-ORC poll released Thursday showed Roberts leading Orman by 1 percentage point and winning the lion’s share — 84 percent — of likely Republican voters.
Chuck Henderson, a charter member of the Flint Hills Tea Party, predicted that most conservatives would swallow their dissatisfaction with Roberts and turn out to vote for him on Election Day.
He said the rationale many conservatives will use to support Roberts “is holding your nose and voting for the one that isn’t a damn Democrat.”
“Make no mistake, Greg Orman is a Democrat,” he added. “We’re not fooled.”
Henderson emphasized that he was voicing his personal opinion and instructed that his group should be referred to as the Flint Hills TEA Party to reflect the acronym: Taxed Enough Already.
“I’m encouraging every conservative in Kansas, every person of faith in Kansas, every Tea Party activist ... to come out and vote for Pat Roberts. Because if we don’t elect Pat Roberts, it makes the odds far too high that Harry Reid remains majority leader,” Cruz told reporters after the rally.
He said Republicans face a challenge across the country of turning out conservative voters.
“We need to turn out people who are frustrated and understandably frustrated with Washington,” he said. “The case that has to be made in the next 26 days to men and women across the country is there is a better way.”
The GOPe was on the way to losing this one.
Cruz can save it.
Will there be any rapprochement from the GOPe towards conservatives, or do they still hate us more than Democrats?
You gonna have the GOPe Wing of Free Republic after you now!
Ted Cruz is THE LEADER of the Conservative Party in this country.
Limp wristed no-name fools of the GOPe notwithstanding.
Not exactly. Cruz will rally people who hate the stench of GOPe. These folks might have stayed home, given Karl Rove’s putrid smell around the race.
Now they can say they supported their leader.
I’d guess Cruz is worth +5% right off.
BINGO!
Oh, they should be on their knees begging us. Mitch the bitch just got help from an O’Keefe style attack on Grimes and I’ll bet his staff is crapping their pants because it’s “partisan”.
What a bunch of worthless losers.
Look at these Election trolls, acting glad that Cruz is helping out Roberts who they feel should be hung at the RINO yardarms. All the usual suspects.
Indeed, Orman would be still be getting the rat and RINO vote against a different conservative Republican nominee.
This is getting tedious, the time for whining that Roberts didn’t retire has LONG since passed. Ted Cruz stands with conservative Pat Roberts, so should freepers.
Yep.
The trend is our friend.
I think the ‘friend’ has been the group such as ‘Palin, Paul, Ryan, Cruz,
McCain, Dole, etc.’ that have been in the state trying to pull his candidacy
across the line. Even the Koch Brothers are now stepping up to the plate for
Roberts. They just might make it work.
That’s why Reid hates the Kochs so much.. they negate RATS’ expectations and assumptions of republican spending on races.
BTW, how are you holding up after this VoterID ruling? I am infuriated and wondering how our side is going to fix this.
It will get fixed as there are other states out there with the same laws. Appeals should get a reversal unless there is a specific word or wording that needs to be changed in the statute.
See following link for discussion, map and table showing each state’s status.
http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/voter-id.aspx
Introduction: A total of 34 states have passed laws requiring voters to show some form of identification at the polls. As of October 10, 2014, 31 of these voter identification laws are in force. Pennsylvania’s law has been struck down and will not be appealed; North Carolina’s law, enacted in 2013, goes into effect in 2016; and Wisconsin has been blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court from implementing its law for 2014, pending a court case. Texas’ strict photo voter ID law has been struck down by a federal court (an appeal is likely), and an earlier non-strict, non-photo law is in place. Scroll over the map below for state-by state details.
The remaining 19 states use other methods to verify the identity of voters. Most frequently, other identifying information provided at the polling place, such as a signature, is checked against information on file. See NCSL’s Voter Verification Without ID Documents.
Please note that some of the 31 states with voter identification laws in place have enacted stricter requirements with implementation dates in the future. The current, in-effect laws are used here, with footnotes that identify stricter laws to be implemented in 2015 or 2016.
end snip
Because the Left has done a good job at portraying Brownback as an "extremist," so he has tacked left and is alienating conservatives.
Link on the Grimes thing? My in laws are in KY.
All the more reason why Sam "help illegal aliens for Jesus" Brownback was more deserving of a primary challenge than Roberts, IMO. Too bad Milton Wolf got 10X the attention.
BTTT for Deport for giving me a shoulder to cry on and to lift my head with his good news.
Just search under O’Keefe in Article titles. There are 6 or 7, all with new information. If you can’t find them let me know.
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