The Chron has some plaintive questions for Texas’ junior Senator.
Not Ted Cruz
Ted Cruz is a smart man. Texas’ junior U.S. senator is an expert on the U.S. Constitution and a brilliant, Harvard-educated trial lawyer who has appeared before the U.S. Supreme Court numerous times.
Why then, for heaven’s sakes, is Cruz signing on in support of a tea party-led effort to block funding of the Affordable Care Act that threatens a shutdown of the government? This makes no sense, either for Texas or for the Republican Party. In the unlikely event it succeeds, it would spell disaster for both.
GOP strategist Karl Rove, among many others, has pointed out that the strategy would affect only about 1 percent of funding for Obamacare, which is scheduled to come into effect in October.
In the unlikely event Cruz and others succeed in shutting down the government over funding for Obamacare, the results will be a public-relations disaster that the Obama administration undoubtedly will use to maximum effect in the 2014 midterm congressional elections.
Besides, Cruz was sent to Washington to represent all Texans’ best interests. In this case, that duty is best carried out not by stoking more political drama but by showing respect for a process, decreed by the Constitution Cruz rightly reveres, that has made the Affordable Care Act the law of the land.
From a strictly partisan point of view, the most baffling aspect of this approach is the total lack of an upside it would bring for Cruz and his party.
First, Ted Cruz was not “sent to Washington to represent all Texans’ best interests”, he was elected by the seething masses of the GOP primary that thought David Dewhurst was an effete squish, and it is their interests alone that he represents. Why do you think he’s spending so much time in Iowa these days? Not a lot of Texans there, last I checked. Second, as numerous national writers have noted, Cruz belongs to a faction of the radical conservative movement that isn’t interested in electoral outcomes as much as it is interested in rigid ideological purity. (See the primary challenge to Sen. Mitch McConnell, for being insufficiently anti-President Obama, for the latest example of such.) They would much rather lose by their own lights than win even a 98% victory if the latter involves any kind of compromise. You would think the Chronicle might have grasped these basic facts by now, but then they endorsed Cruz for election on the “expectation that Cruz will be schooled by the examples of previous senators from Texas, beginning with [Kay Bailey] Hutchison and continuing with Lloyd Bentsen and Lyndon B. Johnson”, with KBH being the “exemplary role model” here. I’m sorry, but anyone that could actually believe such a thing is naive enough to think that sending money to a Nigerian prince is a sound investment. Ted Cruz is doing exactly what he said he would do while he was running for Senate. The Chronicle’s editorial board would do well to pay attention next time.
I think this is simply a case of the Chron hedging their wording to 1) reduce attacks back on them from this Right Wing craziness, and 2) to reduce the amount of exposure to their previous horribly bad decisions (of endorsing the likes of Cruz).