How Ted Cruz’s fake filibuster began:
Ezra dissects Cruz’s claim that he is speaking for the American people:
Cruz opposes raising taxes on the wealthy. The public supports it. Cruz opposes gun control. The public supports it. Cruz supports sharply cutting spending on Medicare and Social Security. The public opposes it. If Cruz actually believed his job was directly representing the will of the people, his voting record would be extremely different than it is.
Which is why it’s so odd Cruz has chosen this argument. He could just be up there arguing against Obamacare. Instead he’s arguing that we need to #MakeDCListen. He’s making a broad, quasi-philosophical argument that senators should more fully reflect public opinion. But even he doesn’t believe it. Cruz’s filibuster is self-refuting.
Douthat contrasts Cruz with the rest of the “Republican Party’s populist flank”:
Ted Cruz has thus far stood out for the, shall we say, purity of his theatrics. (Some of which are ongoing on the Senate floor at the moment.) The others in that group — Rand Paul, Mike Lee, Marco Rubio — have tried to initiate real policy debates and shift the party’s stance on major issues: Rubio with immigration, Paul (and Lee) with foreign policy and civil liberties, Paul with drug policy and criminal justice, and now Lee with family policy and tax reform.
But not Cruz: He’s defining himself as a national figure not by taking positions on questions that divide his party, but by picking issues where the party is basically united — Obamacare, gun control, taxes — and playing the maximalist while promising the moon. (Tellingly, on the specific fronts where the others have staked out some legitimately bold stances, the Texas senator has mostly tap-danced — he’s “somewhere between Rand Paul and John McCain”on foreign policy, somewhere in the middle of his party on immigration, and so on.) Paul, Rubio and now Lee are all trying to move the party, and conservatism, in a particular direction; Cruz is telling conservatives to fight harder, but otherwise to stay exactly where they are.
The Dish 