Rightwing podcaster and occasional US Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) just might be getting a little nervous about his reelection campaign. Democratic challenger Rep. Colin Allred tied with Cruz in a February poll by the University of Texas at Tyler (both of them at 41 percent), while a March poll by Marist College had Cruz up by six points — hardly a dominating lead at this point.
But Cruz isn’t without a certain low vegetable cunning, so it’s just possible he’s noticed that voters are getting kind of sick of his party and its Dear Leader, to whom Cruz has sworn queasy fealty since Donald Trump humiliated him so badly in 2016. So what the hell, why not try something wildly out of character and probably futile, just to see if it helps? That seems to be the only conceivable reason for Cruz’s new effort to repackage himself as a super-bipartisan guy who can work with Democrats to pass legislation, even though Cruz is one of the nastiest partisans out there, regularly claiming that Democrats hate America and even want to take your beer away.
The Texas Tribune reports that Cruz explained in an interview that he is actually a very bipartisan guy who has many Democratic friends in the Senate, no matter how much the idea of the walking embodiment of Backpfeifengesicht having “friends” might strain credulity. Remember, this is a guy who cluelessly fancies himself an expert on comedy, The Simpsons (he thinks we’re supposed to despise Lisa and agree with Homer), and even “Star Trek,” which he is wrong about too.
But we digress. Here is Ted Cruz, explaining that some of his best friends are bipartisan.
“I actually have very good relationships with many of my colleagues across the aisle,” Cruz told The Texas Tribune, citing his work with Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, Cory Booker and Amy Klobuchar. “I’ve worked with all three of them and all three are friends.”
No, the Tribune does not seem to have called Gillibrand, Booker, and Klobuchar to confirm or deny, or maybe they did but couldn’t hear the answer through the loud cackling guffaws that denote friendship and definitely never contempt.
The interview was part of Cruz’s recent media blitz highlighting his work with Democrats, off the heels of his “Democrats for Cruz” announcement which aims to attract left-leaning voters this November.
Uh huh. Democrats for Cruz and reaching out to left-leaning voters? That’s too crazy for Star Trek’s alternate universe, although we should point out that our own Ted Cruz already has a beard and is evil.
Cruz is also pretending that if anyone is a partisan hack, it’s Allred, who he points out has voted with Democratic leadership like all of the time, which kind of misses the point that Democratic leadership is generally not fucking insane, so voting with it is a good thing.
Still, Cruz strained and tried to make a bipartisan face, surely as disturbing a look as Donald Trump pretending to do “human empathy.” Of course, while touting his bipartisanship, he blamed the press for misrepresenting him.
“It is easy and probably more fun to cover the battles that I have waged against the Obama administration or the Biden administration, or [Senate Majority Leader] Chuck Schumer,” Cruz said. “Those may make for easy headlines, but often overlooked are now 99 different pieces of legislation that I’ve authored and passed into law in my time in the Senate.”
Ah yes, Ted Cruz, advocate of bipartisan comity. Let’s just review a few Wonkette stories on the topic:
Oh, wait, that last one was from the list of “Ted Cruz is a garbage human being” posts, not specifically his partisan awfulness.
And we left out that time Cruz shut down the whole government to make Obamacare go away, which, well, it’s still here.
Rep. Allred isn’t especially worried that Cruz will win over all the moderates looking for bipartisanship:
“I don’t think Ted Cruz is fooling anybody,” Allred said. “He spent 12 years being the most divisive — and proudly so — partisan warrior in the United States. And I think it’s kind of laughable actually that at this point, when he’s in a close race, that he wants to now stress, ‘Oh, actually I have been working in a bipartisan way.’”
The Texas Tribune also points out that Cruz is “routinely ranked as one of the most conservative members in the Senate” and that in the Lugar Center’s 2021 ranking of US senators’ bipartisanship, Cruz finished 91st out of 98 (excluding two senators who hadn’t been in office long), while Texas’s senior senator, John Cornyn, was the eighth-most bipartisan.
Hey, maybe by “bipartisan” Cruz is referring to the fact that a lot of Republicans despise him too, like when Lindsey Graham infamously joked that “If you killed Ted Cruz on the floor of the Senate, and the trial was in the Senate, nobody would convict you.”
Despite Cruz’s insistence that he’s happy to work with Democrats, the feeling, like his love for The Simpsons, isn’t always mutual. The Tribune points out that in late January of 2021, Cruz invited Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to work with him on a package of securities-trading regulations, but for some reason, she turned him down, tweeting
I am happy to work with Republicans on this issue where there’s common ground, but you almost had me murdered 3 weeks ago so you can sit this one out. Happy to work w/ almost any other GOP that aren’t trying to get me killed. In the meantime if you want to help, you can resign.
Gosh, she’s so partisan!
PREVIOUSLY IN TED CRUZ!
[Texas Tribune / CNN]
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