Ted Cruz Is Right

I have to say that the Robespierre of the Tea Party has a point here, doesn’t he? He’s talking about the vote to raise the debt ceiling

What Republican leadership said is we want this to pass, but if every senator affirmatively consents to doing it on 51 votes, then we can all cast a vote no and we can go home to our constituents and say we opposed it. And listen, that sort of show vote, that sort of trickery to the – to the constituents is why Congress has a 13 percent approval rating. In my view, we need to be honest with our constituents. And last week, what it was all about was truth and transparency. I think all 45 Republicans should have stood together and said of course not.

A-fucking-men. The entire Washington dance of wanting things to pass but not wanting to actually vote for them is both an inevitable part of political maneuvering and also deeply corrosive, if allowed to become the norm, of representative democracy. There has come a point in Washington where what would appear to sane outsiders as an act of preposterous hypocrisy, weaseling and cowardice … has simply become routine. And the umbrage of two-faced Senators complaining that they actually had to take a stand on something is, once you allow the layers of world-weariness to peel off, an obvious affront to, well, all of us.

Ted Cruz is a world-class meshuggenah asshole. But at least he’s not as unremittingly Washington as John McCain and Mitch McConnell.