I have to say Jason Zengerle’s Cruz profile is both hilarious and horrifying. My favorite douchey detail from the alleged populist:
As a law student at Harvard, he refused to study with anyone who hadn’t been an undergrad at Harvard, Princeton, or Yale. Says Damon Watson, one of Cruz’s law-school roommates: “He said he didn’t want anybody from ‘minor Ivies’ like Penn or Brown.”
Chait is taken aback by the latest gambit of the least self-aware ego-maniac in the Senate:
[T]he new stop-Obamacare plan now entails filibustering the defunders’ own bill. They can do this with just 41 votes in the Senate, if they can get them. But consider how terrible this situation is for the Republicans. If they fail, it will be because a handful of Republicans joined with Democrats to break the filibuster, betraying the defunders. This means the full force of the defund-Obamacare movement – which is itself very well funded by rabid grassroots conservatives eager to save the country from the final socialistic blow of Obamacare — will come down on the handful of Senate Republicans who hold its fate in their hands. The old plan at least let angry conservatives blame Democrats for blocking their goal of defunding Obamacare. Now the defunders can turn their rage against fellow Republicans, creating a fratricidal, revolution-eats-its-own bloodletting.
Got your popcorn yet? This is gonna break bad. The Fix reports, moreover, that, unless “there is a major shift among Republicans in the Senate, Cruz won’t [even] be able to find those 40 votes”:
Does Cruz launch a traditional talking filibuster, a doomed but principled effort to show how strongly he opposes the measure?
If he doesn’t, is he able to convince/cajole a handful of wavering Republican senators to vote against cloture? Can Cruz make enough of a stand in the Senate to stiffen the spines of House Republicans — assuming the legislation, sans defunding Obamacare, is headed their way some time in the next week?
Drum’s assessment:
Unless Reid agrees beforehand to Cruz’s demands, he’s going to filibuster the House bill even though it includes language defunding Obamacare. Can he get most of the Republican caucus in the Senate to go along with this? I doubt it—not in the long run, anyway. Cruz isn’t willing to admit that a Republican filibuster against the House Republicans’ own bill would strike the American public as ridiculous, but it would.
Yes, his sense of the ridiculous seems somewhat tenuous, I’d say. No wonder so many of Cruz’s congressional colleagues hate him:
[R]unning for president (which Cruz would plainly like to do one day) means getting a whole lot of people to like you. Fundraisers, reporters, other politicians who might endorse you, power brokers from the highest party pooh-bah down to every block captain in Des Moines—you’ve got to court them and make them love you so they’ll work their hearts out. Politicians like Bill Clinton and George W. Bush who excel at that personal side of politics have an immense leg up.
It’s one thing to be personally awkward, like Al Gore or Mitt Romney—that makes it harder, but not impossible. But if you’re someone who inspires this kind of venom, that’s another matter entirely.
(Photo: United States Senator Ted Cruz speaks during a town hall meeting hosted by Heritage Action For America at the Hilton Anatole in Dallas on August 20, 2013. By Brandon Wade/Getty Images)
The Dish 