[Flash Walken]

Here's Ted Cruz illustrating what I was talking about in my previous post. With the problems surrounding Chris Christie, Ted Cruz is now auditioning for the big republican presidential dollars, and it is costing long tenured republicans.

By forcing Senate Republicans like Mitch McConnell to vote in favor of advancing the debt limit bill, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) helped Democrats, while sabotaging McConnell’s reelection campaign.

Ted Cruz insisted on filibustering the clean debt ceiling bill that the House passed yesterday, so this meant that the top two Republicans in the Senate, Mitch McConnell and John Cornyn were forced to vote for advancing the bill. After McConnell and Cornyn voted in support of advancing the bill to a final vote, ten other Republicans switched their votes from no to yes, making the final total 67-31.

Mitch McConnell is not only facing a tea party challenger in the Republican primary for his Senate seat back home in Kentucky, he is also dealing with a conservative electorate that already believed he was compromising too much with President Obama. By forcing Senate Republicans to vote to overcome a filibuster, Cruz made Mitch McConnell’s prospects for keeping his Senate seat a whole lot worse.

Cruz’s motivations became clear after the vote.

In a statement, Sen. Cruz said:

Today’s vote is yet another example that establishment politicians from both parties are simply not listening to the American people. Outside the beltway, Americans of all political stripes understand that we cannot keep spending money we don’t have.

Some members of Congress care so much about being praised by the Washington media that they’re willing to mortgage our children’s future. They pretend we don’t have a problem and can just kick the can down the road.

Let’s be clear about the motive behind this vote — there are too many members of Congress who think they can fool people and they will forget about it the next week. But sometimes, come November, the people remember.

Ted Cruz intentionally screwed McConnell, because he is trying to get him out of the Senate. Cruz is also using this stunt to boost his 2016 presidential ambitions. Cruz has aligned himself with the Senate Conservatives Fund, which has already been running ads against Mitch McConnell in Kentucky. The Senate Conservatives Fund also supports McConnell’s primary challenger, Matt Bevin.

http://www.politicususa.com/2014/02/...nate-seat.html

WASHINGTON -- It seems Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has taken up a new cause in Congress -- defending states' right to regulate marriage.

Amid a wave of court decisions striking down anti-gay marriage laws in states, the Texas Republican introduced a bill to the Senate Wednesday to amend U.S. law "with regard to the definition of 'marriage' and 'spouse' for Federal purposes and to ensure respect for State regulation of marriage." Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) is the bill's only co-sponsor so far.

The bill's authors sent out a release about the bill Thursday afternoon, saying "it will ensure the federal government gives the same deference to the 33 states that define marriage as the union between one man and one woman as it does to the 17 states that have chosen to recognize same-sex unions."

“I support traditional marriage. Under President Obama, the federal government has tried to re-define marriage, and to undermine the constitutional authority of each state to define marriage consistent with the values of its citizens,” Cruz said in a statement. “The Obama Administration should not be trying to force gay marriage on all 50 states. We should respect the states, and the definition of marriage should be left to democratically elected legislatures, not dictated from Washington. This bill will safeguard the ability of states to preserve traditional marriage for its residents.”

Cruz's bill comes after Rep. Randy Weber (R-Texas) introduced a bill in January called the "State Marriage Defense Act Of 2014," which would require federal agencies to look into a person's "legal residence" when determining marital status and how federal law would be applied.

In June the Supreme Court struck down the Defense of Marriage Act, which had barred the federal government from recognizing same-sex marriages. Since then, the federal government has allowed gay married couples to file jointly on federal tax returns regardless of state residence and has permitted the surviving spouse of gay married couples to collect Social Security benefits, along with an array of other benefits that were previously only available to heterosexual marriages.

Cruz warned of the dangers of gay marriage a month after the Supreme Court decision in a July 2013 interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network. "If you look at other nations that have gone down the road towards gay marriage, that’s the next step where it gets enforced," he said. "It gets enforced against Christian pastors who decline to perform gay marriages, who speak out and preach biblical truths on marriage."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/0...n_4780699.html

Way back in early February, we heard that Ted Cruz had decided to start playing nice with his fellow Republicans.

What a difference 10 days make.

After Speaker John Boehner moved Tuesday to pass a "clean" debt-ceiling increase, relying on Democratic votes in the House, it looked like the increase could have an easy path through the Democratic-controlled Senate. Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew said the nation would hit the debt limit at the end of the month, and with Congress on recess until February 25, Wednesday's vote was almost do or die.

But the freshman senator from Texas had other ideas, as he often does. Instead of consenting to pass the increase with a bare majority, Cruz announced he'd filibuster, requiring a 60-vote threshold to invoke cloture on the measure. Perhaps sardonically, he told Politico he didn't think that would annoy his GOP colleagues.

You can see where this is going. When the cloture vote came up Wednesday afternoon in the Senate, Democrats voted for it en masse, but the measure still needed a few votes to pass. After a tense hour, and with the nation's full faith and credit on the line, it fell to Republican Senators Mitch McConnell and John Cornyn to, well, pick your cliché: swallow the bitter pill, take one for the team, walk the plank. Once it was clear there were enough Republican votes to invoke cloture, several of their GOP colleagues joined them and voted for cloture. The final vote was 67-31, not even close. A short time later, the Senate passed the increase 55-43, in a vote that required only a simple majority.

McConnell and Cornyn are part of the Republican leadership—the minority leader and whip, respectively—so it made sense for them to take the hit. On the other hand, both are facing primary challenges this year from opponents who have deemed them insufficiently conservative. They're both still strong favorites to win their races: Cornyn's challenger, Representative Steve Stockman, is a carnival of campaign chaos and catastrophe; this week, he denied jail time that he had previously acknowledged. McConnell's likely Democratic opponent, Alison Lundergan Grimes, has been running even or ahead of him in polls, but he's still got a hefty lead over Republican challenger Matt Bevin. But this vote is great news for both Bevin and Stockman, who suddenly have new, potent fodder for Republican primaries. If they haven't dropped the thank-you notes in the mail yet, they're surely coming soon. (The first McConnell condemnation, from a group backing Bevin, landed in my inbox as I wrote this paragraph.)

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/...-again/283787/

The freshman senator, perhaps best known in recent months as one of the most strident critics of the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, plans to use a speech at a conservative policy conference Monday to start shifting his focus to other areas of concern, chiefly U.S. energy policy.
Aides said the senator is working on a bill that he plans to call the American Energy Renaissance Act and will outline its general principles during a speech at the Heritage Action for America's Conservative Policy Summit in Washington.

"There is only one thing that will stop us from embracing it to its full potential: the federal government," Cruz will say, according to prepared remarks provided by aides. "Nothing else will stop the next generation of American energy pioneers. It won’t be lack of determination, ingenuity, or grit. It will be some faceless bureaucrat sitting somewhere in some tall building who simply says, 'You’re not allowed to do that.' Or worse, 'We’ll do that for you.' "

"Yes, President Obama should drop his political opposition to the Keystone pipeline," Cruz plans to say. "But we also need to think bigger than Keystone. We need an energy policy that goes beyond Keystone. Here we stand with our toes at the edge of an energy revolution that could sweep the nation, providing an untold number of new opportunities and well-paying jobs."

Cruz is expected to advocate for more offshore oil exploration; increasing energy development on federal lands; loosening federal restrictions on hydraulic fracturing by leaving environmental and permitting concerns up to state governments; ending the crude oil export ban; and ending Environmental Protection Agency regulations that he believes adversely affect the nation's coal and electric power plans.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/...than-keystone/