Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s promise to back the GOP nominee for president could come back to haunt him if that nominee is Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who has called McConnell a liar on the Senate floor.
“I intend to support the nominee of our party,” McConnell said when asked by reporters about the GOP turning its back on either Cruz, R-Texas, or Donald Trump, who are the current Republican presidential leaders.
While Trump is the clear leader in delegates, Cruz has been catching up, and he split the primary and caucus victories held on Saturday in four states. Trump now has 384 delegates to Cruz’s 300, and a growing anti-Trump movement within the GOP establishment has led to speculation about a Cruz nomination if no candidate wins the requisite 1,237 delegates by the July Republican National Convention.
But Cruz is a senator who is almost universally disliked by his GOP colleagues, and he has not received a Senate endorsement, although he has won the backing of a few House Republicans. While many Republican lawmakers dislike Trump, they despise Cruz.
Cruz, who won his seat on a Tea Party platform, has been bucking the GOP leadership since his arrival in the Senate in 2013, including by filibustering on the Senate floor and publicly denouncing McConnell, R-Ky.
His late-night floor speeches earned him the respect of the conservative base, but they enraged the GOP leadership and even left Democrats in shock. In July, Cruz went to the Senate floor to publicly accuse McConnell of telling “a flat-out lie” to Republicans by promising they could offer amendments on legislation that would revive the Export-Import Bank.
“We now know that when the majority leader looks us in the eyes and makes an explicit commitment, that he is willing to say things that he knows are false,” Cruz said at the time.
Fuming Republican leaders did not publicly respond to the charge, but Democrats said they were flabbergasted.
“I had never heard anything quite like that,” Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., the No. 3 Democratic leader, said Tuesday. “I had never heard one senator call another senator a liar on the floor of the Senate.”
But McConnell could be left with no choice but to make amends with Cruz, whose delegate wins may make him the only candidate who can seriously contest a Trump nomination in a brokered convention.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., whose state split its delegates on Saturday between Trump and Cruz, said Cruz’s reputation among his Senate GOP colleagues does not matter.
“In general, in life it is better to be liked,” said Cassidy, who took office in 2015. “On the other hand, has Ted Cruz helped define the national debate? Yeah. Is that one of the functions a senator attempts to do? Yes.”
GOP leader Sen. John Thune, R-S.D., said he believes Cruz would change his combative behavior and work more collaboratively with lawmakers if he became president. But Schumer couldn’t help but have some fun with Thune’s suggestion.
“That’s a great slogan,” Schumer said to a scrum of reporters. “Vote for Cruz, maybe he’ll change.”
