Just after the Texans’ election in November 2012, GOP leader Mitch McConnell – now the Senate majority leader—asked Cruz to serve as NRSC vice chairman in charge of grassroots outreach. In effect, he sought to bring the tea partier into the tent by making him the liaison to tea partiers.
But it quickly became obvious that Cruz wasn’t so much of a team player.
He sought to recruit and promote like-minded conservatives ahead of the 2014 GOP primaries. He worked with outside groups that sometimes backed candidates other than those picked and approved by the NRSC – in particular, the Senate Conservatives Fund, which backed challengers to a number of incumbent Republicans, even including McConnell.
The NRSC’s chief goal is to protect incumbent Republican senators, with growing the GOP’s ranks a close runner up.
In the Senate itself, Cruz regularly bucked party leadership – most notably in instigating the government shutdown in fall 2013, over demands to defund Obamacare.
Concur, and it needs to be repeated a lot.