Ryan Christie Its official... Ted Cruz is worse than Ronald Reagan.... Cruz’s facility with constitutional argument draws admiration even from those who do not share his views. “Ted is able to use erudite constitutional analysis with politically appealing slogans—that’s a rare talent,” Walter Dellinger, the former acting Solicitor General in the Clinton Administration, who has debated Cruz, told me. “The only problem is that Ted’s view of the Constitution—based on states’ rights and a narrow scope of federal power—was rejected at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, and then was resurrected by John C. Calhoun, and the Confederates during the Civil War, when it failed again. It’s still around now. I think it’s wrong, but Ted does a very sophisticated version of that view. By one reckoning, the twenty-one-hour speech Cruz mounted against Obamacare last September was his consummate wacko-bird moment. At that time, the House and the Senate were weighing a continuing resolution, which would keep the federal government funded and open. The Republican House, with Cruz’s encouragement, had passed a budget that denied all funds for the Affordable Care Act. It was clear that this budget would never pass the Democrat-controlled Senate and certainly never be signed by the President. So Cruz’s speech merely delayed the inevitable—the passage of a budget that included money for the bill. There are generally two kinds of senators: those who legislate and those who run for President. Cruz’s speech, and its aftermath, locked down his status in the second category. John Cornyn, his Texas colleague, opposed Cruz’s efforts on the shutdown. “Ted is very smart and very articulate and he has a huge following, but the question is whether what he’s doing is going to help us be a majority party,” Cornyn told me. “The great thing about the Senate is that you are a free agent; you can follow your conscience. But if you want to be effective you can’t get your way a hundred per cent of the time. We need to think about the eighty-twenty rule. We need to get back to the idea that it doesn’t always have to be a hundred per cent our way. The way Cruz characterizes the divide in American politics—Washington vs. the people—is demonstrably incorrect. Far more significant than the conflict between the capital and the people is the ideological clash between left and right. Cruz’s rhetoric is mostly an exercise, in the manner of Sun Tzu, of framing the narrative in the most advantageous way. “Anti-Washington” is better positioning than “doctrinaire,” but that is what Cruz is, even compared with his likely rivals for the Republican Presidential nomination. Unlike Marco Rubio, Cruz opposes comprehensive immigration reform; unlike Rand Paul, Cruz embraces the confrontational foreign policy associated with the George W. Bush Administration. Cruz speaks of challenging “the corrupt bipartisan cabal in Washington,” but what he’s really proposing is a purification ritual, the fulfillment of a conservative agenda that has moved well to the right of that of his hero Ronald Reagan. The only Republicans he wants to challenge are those who want to coöperate or compromise with Democrats. As he told the delegates in Fort Worth, Cruz wants to “abolish” the Internal Revenue Service, “audit” the Federal Reserve (though it’s not clear what that means), and, of course, repeal the Affordable Care Act. Cruz’s sincerity in these goals is beyond question. When he was solicitor general of Texas, he had a piece of advice for the lawyers on his staff. “I tried to stress to every lawyer in the office that if any lawyer from the S.G.’s office stands in front of the judge and says, ‘The law is X and the facts are Y,’ then that judge would always, always trust that we are levelling with them and telling the truth.” He’s approached politics the same way. “Since I became a senator, a year and a half ago, I’ve kept two promises to the people of Texas,” he said. “I have endeavored to do what I said I was going to do and I have always told the truth. It says something about Washington that those are perceived as radical acts.”
Posted on: Thu, 26 Jun 2014 23:52:23 +0000
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