The Democratic senator who got heated at Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, on the Senate floor Thursday said he’s considering running for president — just like all his colleagues on Capitol Hill.
“I’m thinking about it, Chuck, like every single other person this building is thinking about it. So I’ll let you know,” Sen. Michael Bennet, D-Colo., told MSNBC’s Chuck Todd, referring to the Capitol.
Bennet accused Cruz earlier Thursday of pretending to want to re-open the federal government before senators voted down two rival bills that would have ended the historic, 34-day shutdown over President Trump’s proposed southern border wall.
“These crocodile tears that the senator from Texas is crying for first responders are too hard for me to take,” Bennet bellowed, alluding to Cruz’s plea on behalf of the Coast Guard. “They’re too hard for me to take, because when the senator from Texas shut this government down in 2013, my state was flooded. It was underwater.”
Bennet said in his interview with MSNBC that, if he were to run, it would be because Trump had moved the country “in a terrible direction.”
“He’s an accelerant. He was sent here to blow this place up. That’s what people in my state who voted for him said. And guess what, they succeeded. But now we’ve got to pick up the pieces and we’ve got to begin to make investments in the next generation of Americans again,” he said. “So there’s a lot of work for us to do going forward. I think there’s ways of working on that here and there are also way of working on that in a presidential campaign.”
