Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, is likely to draw the national spotlight next week with a legislative trifecta: a funding fight over the Department of Homeland Security, a vote for a new attorney general and a review on the future of NASA.
At the same time, Cruz will be hoping to make a splash among the Republican hard core for his possible 2016 presidential run by speaking and mingling Thursday at CPAC, the meeting of the Conservative Political Action Conference.
Cruz, a neophyte politician elected in 2012, became a household name with his 21-hour floor speech leading up to 2013’s partial government shutdown. He seems poised to reprise his role as a shutdown cheerleader, supporting Republicans in the House of Representatives who have tied homeland security funding to rollbacks of President Barack Obama’s executive actions on immigration.
In the Senate, there are not enough Republicans for the 60 votes needed to proceed to a vote, and Democrats have stood firm against undoing Obama’s easing of deportations of nearly 5 million immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally.
While a Texas federal judge Monday blocked Obama’s executive actions, Cruz and other conservatives are still pressing for a tough DHS funding bill with the immigration provisions intact.
Cruz’s strategy, unsurprisingly, is to blame the Democrats.
“So Senate Democrats should look very closely at this opinion and decide if they are willing to jeopardize national security, which is both reckless and irresponsible, in order to try to hold DHS funding hostage and to try to force implementation of an amnesty order that the federal court has now concluded is illegal,” Cruz said at a news conference Wednesday in Texas.
Cruz’s hard line makes it tougher for the Senate Republican leadership, including Texas Sen. John Cornyn, the Senate Republicans’ top vote-counter, to find a way out.
“He comes from a base of the party that does not like compromise,” said David A. Crockett, political science professor at San Antonio’s Trinity University. (He is a distant cousin of Alamo defender Davy Crockett.) “His purist views dovetailed nicely with his presidential ambitions at this stage.”
Cruz will also be a “no” vote at the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday when the panel decides on the nomination of Loretta Lynch, U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, to be attorney general.
The Texan wants Republicans to defeat Lynch’s nomination outright because of her support for the legality of Obama’s executive actions on immigration. If enough Republicans on the Judiciary Committee vote for her, as an alternative Cruz has suggested that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., not bring the nomination to the floor.
Potential presidential rival Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., has scoffed at that strategy, pointing out that blocking Lynch ensures that Attorney General Eric Holder, a favorite GOP target, will remain in charge.
“Nobody is going to say that the executive order is illegal that President Obama appoints, so the idea that we would block an attorney general nominee until you’ve gotten somebody to agree with Sen. Cruz about the executive order is probably not feasible,” Graham said earlier this month. “It ensures that Eric Holder stays in place for two years. It’s picking a fight that we can’t win.”
But irritating his Republican colleagues is a Cruz trademark.
“Cruz should probably pay to have other senators denounce him,” said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. “There is a strong populist, anti-establishment fervor among the Republican troops today, and their attitude is often, ‘If the establishment is for it, I’m against it.’ ”
Cruz did find something that he’s for: space exploration. A Houston resident, he got, with the GOP Senate majority this year, what members would traditionally consider a plum assignment: chairmanship of the subcommittee overseeing NASA. The agency’s Johnson Space Center is in Houston.
And Tuesday he will hold his first hearing as chairman of the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee’s Subcommittee on Science, Space and Competitiveness.
Cruz is going for the glitz factor, starting off with three former astronauts: retired Col. Buzz Aldrin, Apollo 11 pilot; retired Col. Walt Cunningham, Apollo 7 pilot; and Michael Massimino, mission specialist on two spaceflights.
“We will look to ensure that NASA and commercial space have clear and consistent mission objectives and can continue to work alongside our international partners, but not be dependent on them,” said Cruz in announcing the hearing. “America should once again lead the way for the world in space exploration.”
The hearing gives Cruz a forum to bash the administration over its implementation of the space program and reliance on the Russians to ferry U.S. crews to the International Space Station. The U.S. retired the space shuttle program in 2011.
“Cruz does not really view his role as bringing home pork to his home state,” said, Mark P. Jones, political science professor at Rice University in Houston. “The way Cruz sees his path to the nomination is by galvanizing the movement conservatives and tea party wing of the party.”
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