Ted Cruz is right back where he started — in the Senate minority and plotting a presidential bid, although now the runner-up for the 2016 Republican nomination is the grizzled veteran looking over his shoulder at the young, brash upstarts he used to be.
Cruz arrived on Capitol Hill from Texas in 2013, an impatient Tea Party Republican who openly quarreled with GOP leadership and ignored Senate etiquette as he prepared to run for president. Cruz still has a rebellious streak. But back in the minority after Democrats flipped the Senate and looking ahead to 2024, Cruz has matured. He is more deliberate and ideologically doctrinaire — especially compared to populist Republican senators who take their cues from former President Donald Trump.
In an interview with the Washington Examiner Thursday, Cruz declined to break news on his 2024 plans. But the senator left no doubt where his heart is. “I ran in 2016 and came in second. The campaign was the most fun I’ve ever had in my life. I loved every minute of every day. The grassroots coalition we saw come together behind our campaign in 2016 was breathtaking.”
Cruz turned 50 in December and has for a while sported a graying, salt-and-pepper beard that creates a sharp, visual contrast with the clean-shaven, even-younger-than-42-years-old he looked when he was first sworn into the Senate. Cruz quickly made enemies, engineering over the objections of most Senate Republicans a futile government shutdown in a quixotic bid to force President Barack Obama to shelve his signature healthcare overhaul.
Two years later, Cruz stirred the pot again when he called top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell, then the majority leader, a liar on the floor of the chamber. Cruz would eventually be chastened by the sting of defeat and the sting of near-defeat.
In 2016, Trump outlasted Cruz in the race for the GOP nomination, with the senator roundly rejected by grassroots conservatives, and Republican voters in Texas, after he refused to endorse the future president at the party’s Cleveland convention. Two years later, Cruz was nearly defeated for reelection to the Senate by Democrat Beto O’Rourke. Those experiences taught Cruz to place more value on relationships with colleagues and to be more measured with criticism of fellow Republicans.
But the senator has not lost his bite. Cruz was critical when asked to assess separate proposals to raise the federal minimum wage from Sens. Tom Cotton of Arkansas and Josh Hawley of Missouri, who are following in Cruz’s footsteps. Both are in their early 40s; both are Ivy League lawyers; both are unconstrained by political tradition; both support populist policies popularized in GOP circles under Trump. And both might compete against Cruz in 2024.
“I think we need to know what we stand for and what we believe, and we need to actually stand for something,” said Cruz, a Republican, who, ideologically, hails from the more traditional wing of the party defined by fidelity to President Ronald Reagan.
“The Democratic proposals would double the minimum wage to $15 an hour. Some Republicans are proposing raising it just not that much,” Cruz said. “I think the Democratic proposal is really harmful, and the Democratic-lite proposal is somewhat harmful. Both are misguided. If either proposal were to pass, hundreds of thousands or even millions of jobs would be destroyed.”
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Cruz counters suggestions that his edges have softened. The senator explains that with the transition from Obama to Trump in 2017, he naturally adjusted from opposing the White House to working with the administration, and Republicans in Congress, to find majorities to pass conservative legislation.
As if to reestablish his rebellious bona fides, Cruz broke with McConnell in late December, when the GOP leader implored Senate Republicans join him in certifying the outcome of the 2020 election. Indeed, Cruz organized a group of 11 Republican objectors in the Senate and proposed a plan that, had it been adopted, would have delayed certification of President Biden’s Electoral College victory while a congressional panel investigated Trump’s claims of voter fraud.
Of course, Cruz decided to act after Hawley, in true Cruz fashion circa 2013, became the first Republican to spurn McConnell and regaled in the righteousness of his decision.
The Cruz of 2021 considered acting alone but decided to take the extra time to assemble a coalition of allies, concluding it made for better strategy. And the senator who, over the years, has dealt confident absolutes concedes that he “wrestled” with his decision to object to the outcome of the November election and that there were good arguments on both sides of the issue.
“There were certainly good-faith disagreements,” Cruz said. “I generally try to avoid impugning the motives of my colleagues. These were hard issues.”
