I saw my favorite senator on the cover this month, Ted Cruz. Knowing this leftist rag really loves Republicans, especially actual conservatives, I could expect real objective journalism here. Here is the cover.
You get the impression they are not impressed by his first year being eventful, as they put it. I wonder why. Here are some highlights of the article with commentary.
To simultaneously elicit such admiration and such scorn is unusual for a freshman senator and, in a way, impressive. As 2013 drew to a close, observers were increasingly wondering whether the 43-year-old Cruz was thinking of running for the Republican presidential nomination in 2016. It was not an unreasonable thought, despite Cruz’s youth and his relative inexperience. Barack Obama had served less than four years in the Senate before being elected president in 2008, and Cruz had already made a greater impression on Congress than Obama had during his time there. The problem was that it was a distinctly polarizing one. By leading the fight against Obamacare, Cruz had endeared himself to the Republican base to a greater degree than most of the party’s presidential prospects had... If such voters looked at his overall record, they would see a more complex character than Cruz’s national caricature would suggest. Whether they would be willing to take a look was very much an open question....
Yes, but unlike B Hussein Obama, there is a record of accomplishment to back up his election to the Senate. Texas Solicitor General who has won won cases at the Supreme Court and indirectly challenged the president, George W Bush, he worked for and helped elect. The former junior senators from New York and Illinois were actually selected by their party leadership and won with party support. David Dewhurst, the serving Lieutenant Governor of Texas, was the selected man to serve in the senate. Ted Cruz came from less than 5% name recognition to win a state election against a multimillionaire who had never lost an election. Not bad.
...As we headed up the Capitol steps, I realized that Cruz’s response to the previous question reminded me of something I had mentally summarized as the Barry Goldwa ter scenario—the prospect that Cruz could be the kind of Republican who could win the party’s presidential nomination but alarm voters in a general election, just as Goldwater had in 1964 against LBJ.
“If you had a Goldwater scenario, that would be okay with you?”
“Not at all,” he said, “because we have a limited window to turn this country around. We can’t keep going down this path without permanently jeopardizing the future for subsequent generations. And I think the window to turn things around is not decades, it is a matter of a few years. There comes a point where the hole is too deep, where our debt is too large, where our liberties have been too profoundly eroded, that there’s no turning back....
Goldwater scenario? Someone put it best, if the Republicans had nominated Jesus Christ in 1964 Johnson still would have won. The American people would not tolerate a third president in just over a year. Especially after loosing Kennedy to an televised assasssignation and the dirty tricks played by the LBJ campaign. If you need the classic example, Daisy.
...And so June 28, 2012, would prove to be a critical date. That was the day the Supreme Court upheld key aspects of the Affordable Care Act, providing Cruz with exactly the opening he needed, at exactly the moment he needed it. The Affordable Care Act was deeply unpopular among Texas Republicans, tea party or otherwise. Both candidates had opposed it and promised to fight for its repeal if elected. But the distinction Cruz had drawn between himself and Dewhurst had suddenly become highly relevant. Cruz argued that he, not Dewhurst, was the one who would be the man in the arena, as Teddy Roosevelt had put it, with blood and sweat on his face. “Obamacare underscores the fundamental difference between me and David Dewhurst,” Cruz said. “Lieutenant Governor Dewhurst is a deal-maker. He is a conciliator.”
The argument worked. In the May primary Dewhurst had received about 628,000 votes to Cruz’s 481,000. In the July runoff the totals were reversed. Dewhurst won 480,126 votes, but 631,812 Texans had turned out for Cruz. It was the biggest upset in Texas politics in a generation. To find anything like it, you have to go back to 1961, when a conservative economics professor named John Tower thumped Democrat Bill Blakely in the race to fill LBJ’s Senate seat, making Tower the first Republican elected statewide since Reconstruction...
And yes, Cruz made it very clear he was going to do what he could to stop Obamacare. And won. And after actually doing what he said he would, his popularity is threw the roof in the state and country. Hey McConnell, maybe you should take some hints. We don't want someone to reach across the aisle, We want someone to throw a wrench into this and stop it. But that would require leadership, something you have no concept of.
...After graduating from Second Baptist School, in Houston, he went east to Princeton, where he wrote his senior thesis on the Ninth and Tenth amendments. After college, he enrolled at Harvard Law, then spent two years as a law clerk, at Virginia’s Fourth Circuit and the Supreme Court, for William Rehnquist. From there he worked in private practice before joining Bush’s 2000 presidential campaign as a domestic policy adviser and then as a legal counsel, when the bungled results in Florida sent the final decision about the election to the Supreme Court. Among his colleagues on the Bush campaign was a blond Californian named Heidi Nelson. They married in 2001—Cruz considers himself to be the quiet one in the relationship—and they have two young daughters, Caroline and Catherine...
Sounds like the all American family. Oh, BTY, the election results were not bungled. ALGORE challenged them in the Florida courts, the Florida Supreme Court stuck its nose into the election, trying to throw the election to the democrats. Fortunately SCOTUS slapped them own. ALGORE lost in a whisper, in spite of all their cheating. I've always believed what really did it was the release of this picture, showing a scared kid looking down the barrel of a rifle. That really pissed off the Cubans-American population in Florida.
...When the Senate was debating a gun-control bill, for example, after the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary, he had annoyed Dianne Feinstein, a Democratic senator from California, by asking her whether she would deem it appropriate to abridge the protections laid out in the First and Fourth amendments the same way she was proposing with regard to the Second, prompting her to snap at him, “I’m not a sixth grader.”...
Yes Dianne, you are not. A sixth grader is more intelligent. You are a poster child for term limits.
...Once again, he cited Medellín v. Texas, the case he had discussed at the Heritage Foundation. It concerned a gang member named José Medellín, who had been sentenced to death in Texas for his role in the 1993 rape and murder of two teenage girls in Houston. There was no question that Medellín was guilty—he had confessed—but he was also a Mexican national, and at the time of the arrest, no one had notified him of his right under a 1963 treaty called the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations to contact consular authorities. In 2004 the International Court of Justice had ruled that 51 Mexican nationals in such situations, including Medellín, had the right to a review of their convictions. The next year President Bush issued a memorandum referencing the World Court’s decision and ordered the states to comply. Texas balked.
“The narrative of the other side was straightforward,” Cruz said. “It was ‘Texas cannot flout the treaty obligations of the United States of America. Texas cannot thumb its nose at the federal government, and at the president of the United States, and at every nation on the face of the earth. And besides, you know how those Texans are about capital punishment anyway.’ If that’s what the case is about, we lose. If the question is ‘Can Texas defy the treaty obligations of the United States?’ we lose. And that’s why just about every observer said there’s no way Texas can win.”
Instead Abbott and Cruz decided to approach it as a separation of powers case. By ordering Texas to comply with the World Court’s ruling, Cruz argued, Bush was ignoring Congress’s authority to implement treaties in accordance with existing American law. He was also snubbing the Supreme Court, which hadn’t yet weighed in on the subject.
“At the end of the day, the court adopted our narrative,” Cruz concluded. “And we didn’t just win, we won six to three, which astonished observers. I’m convinced that framing it as a separation of powers case instead of a federalism case was critical to winning it.”...
Sounds like a serious legal mind at work. Someone who believes in federalism and separation of powers. What a radical concept.
...The Senate, accordingly, stripped the defunding language out and sent it back to the House. That chamber, though, had fallen into disarray. The tea party Republicans were in no mood to compromise, and without their support, House speaker John Boehner was apparently reluctant to hold a vote on the Senate’s version of the bill. On October 1 the federal government began its partial shutdown, and people began hurling accusations at one another about who was to blame. The Democrats blamed the Republicans. The House blamed the Senate. The president blamed Congress. And almost everyone blamed Cruz....
No, propaganda came out saying the Republicans had shut down the "government" although less than 20% was shut down. And B Hussein Obama ordered national parts shut down just to make it more painful. And under the leadership of Boehner and McConnell, they folded. Thanks guys.
...Making matters worse was that at the time of Cruz’s pseudo-filibuster, the country was facing more than a federal government shutdown: it was facing the prospect of defaulting on its debt payments. Many economists were warning against this in the gravest possible terms; the United States is the largest economic power in the world, and the American dollar is the world’s most important currency of last resort. Over the next few weeks, as the shutdown continued and the deadline for raising the debt ceiling drew closer, Cruz was excoriated by almost everyone. Even some conservative activists felt that he had taken things too far. “He pushed House Republicans into traffic and wandered away,” said Grover Norquist, a longtime anti-tax activist....
One, the US was in no risk of defaulting of its debt. There was more than enough money coming in to pay the interest, which is required by the 14 Amendment. Oh, Grover Norquist is a Chamber of Commerce propagandist and they want lower taxes. And amnesty. And quantitative easing, printing billions of dollars and putting in into the market, inflating the currency. Not exactly someone we would listen to, IMHO.
...In recent years the Republican Party, around the country, has been a noticeably dyspeptic coalition of fiscal conservatives, social conservatives, tea partiers, and libertarians. The 2016 presidential primary will therefore be a battle over the direction of the party as much as the nomination. The establishment would like to see a nominee who can bridge the party’s internal divisions and swing votes in the general election, like Chris Christie, Scott Walker, or Jeb Bush. Many Republican primary voters, however, will hold out for a candidate committed to their key concerns. The Republican base isn’t looking for crossover appeal, it’s looking for someone who will fight for the cause.
Which explains why leading the polarizing and seemingly self-destructive battle to defund the Affordable Care Act may prove to have been a shrewd move on Cruz’s part. For a Republican who may have his eye on the 2016 presidential primary, having been the last man in the arena fighting against Obamacare is a pretty good campaign credential. Things haven’t changed that much since the 2012 Senate campaign: the law is unpopular with Republican primary voters. And, significantly, no other issue is equally unpopular with the various factions of the Republican coalition.
By making this his central issue, Cruz has won over conservative activists. At the same time, he hasn’t necessarily implicated himself in something that moderates can never forgive. Many of Cruz’s Republican colleagues in Congress derided his defunding strategy, but not a single one of them voted for the law in the first place. At the end of the day, it wasn’t just the tea party that was leery of the Affordable Care Act. If the law represents a major and potentially transformative expansion of America’s safety net, it also represents a major and potentially transformative expansion of government power....
Gee, Obamacare is unpopular with the Republican base? That goes without saying. You might have wanted to mention that an overwhelming majority of the American people want it repealed. BTY, why Ms Greider, don't you call it Obamacare? Just curious. Maybe because you know how unpopular he and his takeover of the medical industry is?
...Since the rise of the tea party movement, Republican activists have been on the lookout for signs of latent moderation. Even the incumbents who have always been considered conservative are suddenly coming under scrutiny. It happened to Rick Perry: during his ill-fated campaign for the 2012 presidential nomination, the longest-serving governor in Texas history was taken to task for minor doctrinal lapses, like the fact that he had signed the state’s 2001 law authorizing in-state tuition for certain undocumented students. It’s happening in this year’s Republican primaries. In December Steve Stockman, a tea party congressman from Houston, announced a primary challenge to “the liberal John Cornyn”—Texas’ senior senator, who had, in 2012, posted the second-most-conservative voting record in the Senate, according to a ranking by the National Journal
An irony is that if not for the fight against Obamacare, Cruz could have been vulnerable to such purity tests too. He is clearly more focused on fiscal issues than social ones, and he doesn’t use the economy as a proxy for the culture wars. He has repeatedly said that encouraging economic growth should be Congress’s number-one goal; that being the case, he’s disagreed with the party’s strictest budget hawks. “I think Republicans get their priorities wrong at times by focusing too much on austerity,” he told me in Houston. “As much as spending is out of control, given the choice between spending cuts and economic growth, I choose growth one hundred out of one hundred times.” He’s also chided Republicans for failing to reach out to the voters that Mitt Romney notoriously summarized as “the 47 percent” during the presidential campaign. “The top one percent in this country now have the highest share of our income since 1928, under President Obama. The rich do fine with government control of the economy. It’s not about them. It’s about everybody else.”....
National Journal is not exactly an objective source of conservative opinion. Life the Wall Street Journal editorial page, it enjoys a reputation for being conservative, but it's more corporatist. And Cornyn was for it before he was against it. In last week's debt limit extension, Cornyn voted with the Democrats to end Cruz's filibuster. Then Cornyn voted "against" the debt limit extension, alloying the Democrats to give B Hussein Obama another 1.5 trillion to piss away. And for that he got us.....nothing. No reforms to Obamacare, he din't remade the Keystone XL be approved, budget/entitlement reforms. He got nothing. And that is why Cornyn is scared. He knows if he cannot win the nomination fight outright next month, if he is put into a primary, he is vulnerable. Cornyn doesn't want to be the next Dewhurst. He likes being part of the ruling class.
I look at articles like this and they show how much journalist, at every level, are embedded into America's ruling class. Granted, Texas Monthly doesn't claim to be objective, like the NY Puke. But like the readers of the Times, the readers of the Texas Monthly are liberal Austin types. They don't like Cruz, never have, never will. But one recalls the words of Great Britain's two greatest prime ministers in the 20th Century. Churchill said, "You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life." And as Thatcher said, "I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left." Ted Cruz has enemies, the right ones (B Hussein Obama, Harry Reid, the RINO leadership, etc) and
they have gone after him personally. And that, alone, is enough to say I did right by donating to the man's campaign two years ago, giving him my vote, and asking him to run for President.
TED CRUZ 2016!
