Freshman Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas is like Jim DeMint on steroids, and that probably means that he doesn’t have much of a future in the U.S. Senate. DeMint burned so many bridges with his colleagues that a position at the Heritage Foundation became more attractive to him than going to work each day with 99 people who hated his guts. But DeMint wasn’t in the habit of having his staff insult other Republican members on a regular basis.
Senator Cruz is pretty obviously going to run for the Republican nomination for president, and he’s positioning himself as the most far-right candidate in the race. Everyone else is a coward. Everyone else is corrupted by Washington. Only Senator Cruz has the steel to fight. Republicans who don’t want to shut down the government have to defend themselves from these attacks, and presidential aspirants will have to be willing to do it in the presidential debates and somehow win the argument with the Republican base. Either that, or they will fall in line with Sen. Cruz. That’s what Sens. Marco Rubio and Rand Paul have done.
The 2016 election is still a long way off, and ObamaCare will be well-established by then. People will be very tired of dysfunction and gridlock by then, too, and there are no signs that the problem will have abated before 2016.
Even though the Republican leadership and consultant class does not want to follow Ted Cruz’s government shutdown strategy, none of them dare argue against the underlying principle, which is to repeal ObamaCare. That will remain an orthodox article of faith that no Republican can deviate from. It’s a sickness.
And Senator Cruz is spreading the disease.
