Once denounced by McCain as ‘wacko birds’ hogging the spotlight, Ted Cruz and Rand Paul are soaring. Nick Gillespie on why Cruz’s faux filibuster has nothing to do with Obamacare—and everything to do with building a broad-based coalition.
Make no mistake about it: the on-going “extended speech” by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has absolutely nothing to do with defunding the Affordable Care Act—or even delaying it for one goddamn day.
As the long list of Senate Republicans who declined to back a full-blown, fill-your-hands-you-son-of-a-bitch filibuster over Obamacare could tell you, it’s a done deal that the president’s consistently unpopular
health-care law is going forward even if the government shuts down.
Come next week, the enrollment period is going to start, and come
January 1, 2014, the plan will kick into gear despite every reason to
believe it will be a clusterfudge of epic proportions.
So
what exactly was Cruz doing up there, hogging the limelight on C-SPAN’s
low-wattage webstream for a couple of hours, if he wasn’t serious about
stopping Obamacare? He was playing his part in a pretty goddamned
brilliant strategy to win the future not for himself but for the Republican Party.
Cruz
and his fellow Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) are the best-known of the gaggle
of legislators that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) denounced as “wacko birds”
earlier this year. “It’s always the wacko birds on right and left that
get the media megaphone,” sputtered McCain in the wake of Paul’s immensely popular and influential filibuster,
which called much-needed attention to the Obama administration’s glib
attitude toward civil liberties and executive branch overreach.
There’s every reason to believe that the future belongs to the wacko birds and their general, transpartisan message that government is too big and too powerful.
The
wacko bird caucus overlaps pretty well with the Tea Party. Besides Cruz
and Paul, it includes such characters as Sens. Mike Lee (R-UT) and
Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Reps. Justin Amash (R-MI) and Thomas Massie
(R-KY). Despite meaningful differences among them, they all support
cutting federal spending and taxes, and reducing regulations on business
and other economic activities. Unlike many members of the GOP, they are
critical of the national surveillance state and, at least in the cases
of Paul and Amash, are principled non-interventionists who are quick to question the Pentagon budget.
At a time when a record high 60 percent of all Americans agree the federal government has “too much power,” the wacko birds are flying pretty high, especially when they attack their own party for its utter malfeasance
during the Bush years. There’s every reason to believe that the future
belongs to the wacko birds and their general, transpartisan message that
government is too big and too powerful. The trend throughout the 21st
century, reports Gallup,
is increasing skepticism toward Washington, D.C. The trend is
particularly pronounced among all-important independent voters, who make
up a plurality of the electorate. In 2003, 45 percent of them thought
the government was too powerful. Now it’s 65 percent. They will vote for
candidates—and a party—pushing limiting government.
But
Cruz and Paul are speaking to significantly different audiences,
despite being wacko birds of a feather. As befits the son of former Rep.
Ron Paul (R-TX), who ran for president as a libertarian in 1988, Rand
Paul is a consciously unconventional Republican who gained his Senate
seat after beating Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s handpicked
candidate in the 2012 Kentucky primary.
Paul
is consciously going wide in looking for the sorts of newer, younger
voters his septuagenarian father cultivated during the 2008 and 2012
presidential campaigns. At the Conservative Political Action Convention
(CPAC) in March, he rapped
the GOP hard for having grown “stale and moss-covered” and demanded the
party “embrace liberty in both the economic and the personal sphere.”
Almost alone among national Republican figures, he’s making serious
attempts to win over black voters and woo millennials.
One of his stump-speech lines stresses that Republicans “need to be
white, we need to be brown, we need to be black, we need to be with
tattoos, without tattoos, with ponytails, without ponytails, with
beards, without.”
In contrast to Paul—and despite his suspiciously ethnic surname and scandalously Canadian birth—Cruz
is the favorite son of an older, whiter America. As Paul brings in
fresh new blood to a broad, limited-government coalition, Cruz is
locking down the tired old blood that realizes the John Boehners, Mitch
McConnells, John McCains, and Lindsey Grahams of the world really don’t
give a rat’s ass about them. Almost without exception, Cruz’s positions,
including his “Potemkin battle” to stop Obamacare, mesh perfectly with
what Slate’s David Weigel calls “Republican seats that are largely whiter and more rural than the rest of the country.”
Where
Paul wears turtlenecks, sports weird hair, and talks about letting
states decide their own laws on drugs and marriage, Cruz is rocking a
retrograde, wet-look haircut and is unambiguously and unambivalently
conservative on any social issue, including the phantom menace of Sharia
law (“an enormous problem”
in America, according to Cruz). You’d think Cruz’s Ivy League bona
fides—undergrad at Princeton, law school at Harvard—would hurt his
street cred with disgruntled flyover-country independents and
Republicans, but he’s playing it perfectly. His diplomas certify that’s
he’s just as “whip-smart” as President Obama even as he can testify from
personal experience that Harvard Law is housing a dozen “Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.”
Indeed,
Cruz’s greatest political asset is the disgust he inspires in
mainstream liberals. Every jab by Beltway Draco Malfoys such as The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank (who sniffs
that Cruz is “an opportunist driven more by ambition than ideology”)
and get-a-load-of-this eye-rolling by coastal elitists (Cruz was “creepy” as an undergrad and strolled around Princeton in a “paisley bathrobe”) make him more effective with his core audience. GQ readers may think Jason Zengerle’s well-wrought hatchet job has shown all the world what a pompous, humble-bragging
jackass Cruz really is: he can’t stop namedropping! He’s got a
self-aggrandizing portrait of himself in his Senate office! He insulted
the venerable Sen. Dianne Feinstein! The “maverick” John McCain “fucking
hates” him! But the GQ piece, like all liberal criticism of
Cruz, and even vaguely contentious interviews with semi-conservative
types such as Chris Wallace of Fox News, makes him a bigger hero to his
fans.
The
odds are that neither Paul nor Cruz will be president. It’s nothing
against them; it’s just that the odds are stacked against any
individual. But commentators who think these guys are in politics only
for themselves are missing the energy that’s driving the wacko birds.
Maybe, just maybe, they really do believe in shrinking the size, scope,
and spending of the federal government. And maybe they realize that
their vehicle of choice, the Republican Party, really does need to reach
out to new swaths of the electorate while holding on to conservatives.
If
that’s true, then between Paul and Cruz, they’re covering a lot of
territory. For my money, the most interesting moment in Cruz’s
interminable speech came when Paul, who refused to back a filibuster on
defunding Obamacare, popped in to ask a question. It was like an old
Chip and Dale routine from Looney Tunes, where the two excruciating
chipmunks couldn’t stop complimenting each other. Would Cruz, Paul
asked, ever compromise and vote for a budget that included funding for
the Affordable Care Act?
Before getting to a long-winded, circuitous, and utterly predictable no,
Cruz took a few minutes to talk about how Paul’s filibuster in March of
CIA Director John Brennan’s nomination was historic and momentous. Cruz
noted that the filibuster was the first time he ever spoke on the
Senate floor and that it was among “the proudest moments of my life.”
Part
of that is surely just the sort of flattery for which the Senate is
nauseatingly well-known. But there’s no question that these two wacko
birds, and the others in that small and growing nest, are pulling in the
same direction even as they are courting different audiences. They’ve
shown that they can work together, and they’ve shown that they’re not
standard-issue Republicans but true believers in limited government. In a
country where six of 10 voters already think the government is too big,
the wacko bird caucus has got a lot of room to fly.
inside the policy making machine
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1/ The mutually-complimenting extra-polite rodents (after you; no, I insist, after you) in Loony Tunes were the Goofy Gophers. (Not Chip 'n' Dale, who were Disney characters, usu. pitted vs. Donald Duck.)
2/ The public says it wants more limited government. But it actually wants all the benefits and protections that a modern full-service government provides. Just like it hates Obamacare -- but loves all the provisions of it, when enumerated piece by piece. It is (and has always been) a mistake to assume that the electorate is logical.
3/ The crazier the wacko birds, the happier the DNC. If allowed to drive, Cruz takes the GOP over the cliff. (Call it "the dangers of Cruz control.")
Cheers,
D
You are clueless. Reid wouldn't allow any compromises - no amendments, only his own which adds Obamacare funding back in.
We tried to compromise with Obama when this bill was drafted, but you may recall he said to us "I won the election" when we threw out some of our ideas at the healthcare summit. If he had actually accepted some of our ideas, this law wouldn't have turned out to be the festering political sore that it's become and might actually have a chance of not being so bad.
The ACA is based on Republican ideas to begin with. The Dems wanted single-payer. Negotiations with the GOP is exactly why the ACA is the way it is, and then no GOPers voted for it.
Basically, Reid is following the legal procedures that McConnell did when authorizing spending for two wars and a Medicare Part D that wasn't paid for. Except that he's preventing the minority from undoing the will of the people. the 2012 campaign was a referendum on the ACA. Dems held the Oval Office, picked up seats in the Senate, and had more votes for the House that would have mattered if not for gerrymandering. Elections have consequences.
Cruz, Paul and Rubio won't make it past the early stages of the primary in 2016.
I suspect the last time you voted for a Republican was sometime around never.
We live like civilized Americans too, which is why we oppose your efforts to make us live like cavemen in pursuit of your climate religion. But, don't worry, we're armed to the gills and can protect your candyass if China or Russia ever goes Red Dawn on us.
Fu(k U, and that's a fact.
"SMALLER GOVERNMENT" then turns around and wants the government hip deep in the
reproductive organs of half the population of the United States. I'd be all the way behind
these guys on nearly every other part of their so-called platform, but when they want to tell
women who become pregnant, they can just jolly well stay that way and shut up about it, they
lost my interest entirely. The Constitution is about recognizing the rights of citizens, not family
planning, and certainly not curtailing the rights of individuals to make reproductive, or
otherwise sexual, decisions. Furthermore, this "We're Pro-Life, but we love war," and Birth
that kid, but stay the hell outta our wallets once it's born," malarkey has lost legions of
Republican votes, including mine. If R's ever want to be relevant to actual GOVERNANCE,
again, they need to drop the blatantly hypocritical bull excrement from their schtick. Real
conservatives are tired of it.
Oh, so you want to be able to take out an elective hit on your viable 7 month baby just to satisfy your twisted, macabre idea of reproductive choice?
And, don't look now, but we're the reason the Nobel Peace Prize Winner isn't engaged in a vanity war in Syria. You're welcome.