Dana Milbank thinks the Senate is now operating under "Cruz control." Not inaccurate, but face it: Cruz is also just another instance of blind ambition. Texas narcissism tends to have more charm and to be funnier than in the more dour states to our north. But Cruz isn't Texas. He strikes me as having a sense of personal privilege more reminiscent of upper-middle-class Cubans in the '50's.
Cruz has our attention now and he's going to milk it for all it's worth -- a presidential run, maybe.
.... He has already turned upside down the Senate’s ancient seniority system and is dominating his senior Republican colleagues. He’s speaking for them on immigration, guns and any other topic that tickles his fancy; Republican leaders are seething at being outshone yet are terrified of challenging him. ...Milbank,WaPo
Here's a parallel no one has raised so far, and it's a parallel that's given even more relevance by the efforts of the right to turn Senator Joe McCarthy -- a nasty, drunken blotch on our political history -- into a rightwing saint. The Republican party, in the midst of all the harm it's doing, has needed a wake-up call for two or three decades. Maybe Cruz, who's lambasting fellow Republicans, will do the trick.
Cruz is 42, the same age Joe McCarthy was when he amassed power in the Senate with his allegations of communist infiltration. Tail-gunner Ted debuted in the Senate this year with the insinuation that Chuck Hagel, now the defense secretary, may have been on the payroll of the North Koreans. Cruz also wrote in Politico that “Hagel’s nomination has been publicly celebrated by the Iranian government.” He later alleged that Democrats had told the Catholic Church to “change your religious beliefs or we’ll use our power in the federal government to shut down your charities and your hospitals.”
Now Cruz is turning his incendiary allegations against fellow Republicans. On immigration, he has described as amnesty the compromise that Sen. Marco Rubio (Fla.) and three other Republicans negotiated with Democrats. Cruz said such a plan would make “a chump” of legal immigrants. On guns, he said the background checks Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Pa.) negotiated in a bipartisan compromise would lead to a national gun registry — an outcome the doomed proposal explicitly prohibited.
Democrats see a potential bogeyman in Cruz because of his outrageous pronouncements, and reporters love his inflammatory quotes. Republican leaders, however, don’t know how to control this monster they created. ...Milbank, WaPo
