I’m not a fan of Ted Cruz, the hard-eyed senator from Texas, but after last week, I bet that many of his fellow Senate Republicans hold the man in even less esteem than I do. They have good reason.
Last week, by simply saying no to a unanimous-consent request, Texas Senator Ted Cruz forced a number of his fellow Republicans to cast a humiliating vote on the debt ceiling that they did not want to cast. Because of Cruz, 12 GOP senators, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, had to swallow their pride and vote to clear the way for a “clean” debt-ceiling bill that for weeks they had been claiming to oppose. It was a major victory for President Obama, who signed the bill Saturday.
After the vote, Senate Republicans were livid at Cruz. And he reveled in that anger.
“In the 13 months that I’ve been in the Senate, it has become apparent to me that the single thing that Republicans fear the most — and that is when they’re forced to tell the truth,” Cruz told talk-radio host Mark Levin. “It makes their heads explode.”
And the truth, as Cruz indelicately pointed out, is that many Senate Republicans secretly supported the debt-ceiling increase that they claimed to oppose. He merely made them admit it:
“Make no mistake about it, (passage of the debt ceiling) was their desired outcome,” Cruz said. “An awful lot of Republicans wanted exactly what Barack Obama wanted, exactly what Nancy Pelosi wanted, exactly want Harry Reid wanted, which is to raise the debt ceiling, but they wanted to be able to tell what they view as their foolish, gullible constituents back home they didn’t do it. And they’re mad because … they had to come out in the open and admit what they’re doing. And nothing upsets them more.” What Cruz exposed, and what his colleagues hate him for exposing, is the gaping chasm between the red-meat rhetoric that his party feeds its base and the realities of actual, responsible governance. As Cruz noted in the Levin interview, those leaders continue to treat the American people “like a bunch of rubes” incapable of noticing that chasm.
That chasm is now splitting the party. Republican leaders have built the modern GOP upon rhetoric that fires up the base, draws donations and attracts angry listeners to talk-radio programs, but they have done so knowing that the rhetoric cannot plausibly be translated into policy. Instead, people like McConnell, Karl Rove and John Boehner, as well as groups such as the Chamber of Commerce, believed that the chasm could be “managed” by the professionals, allowing the wise, patriarchal party leadership to say one thing in town meetings back home and still do what was necessary in Washington.
That model is collapsing for two reasons:
First, they succeeded too well: Millions of Americans have taken that rhetoric as seriously as a heart attack, internalizing it as doctrine, electing leaders who have also internalized it, and tolerating no deviation. The tide of true believers is coming to realize that those who have been preaching the message all these years weren’t really as sincere as they pretended. The flock is now more fervent than their preachers.
Second, the modern, decentralized media infrastructure that spread the GOP message so effectively has also made it impossible for it to be managed from the top down. The chasm between town-hall rhetoric and Senate-chamber action could be disguised as long as the Republican establishment and the professionals who run it controlled the flow of information, but they don’t. What was once a pipeline of information down from Washington has become a networked ecosystem of information purveyors, each pursuing its own self-interested agenda, and that agenda rarely includes governance or compromise.
Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh, the Tea Party Patriots, the Club for Growth, Ted Cruz and Fox News honestly don’t give a damn about whether Congress can pass a budget or raise the debt ceiling. From their point of view, it’s better if they don’t. It amounts to nihilism, but in terms of dollars and power, it’s at least a very profitable nihilism.
And hey, what else matters, right?
