Sen. Ted Cruz tries to be less insane. Let's watch.

Hunter

Daily Kos Staff

Tuesday February 04, 2014 · 9:45 AM PST

2014/02/04 · 09:45

no image description available — Not Steve Stockman.

U.S. Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) speaks to the press after leaving the Senate Chamber after a marathon attack on

Not Steve Stockman.

This anecdote, via Politico, is presented as evidence of Sen. Ted Cruz getting along better with his Republican colleagues these days:

At a GOP lunch last week, Sen. John McCain noted that “some crazy guy from Texas” stormed out during President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address.
“Hey,” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz chimed in, “I didn’t walk out of the State of the Union.”

The packed room erupted in laughter.

The person who bolted in the middle of the State of the Union would be Rep. Steve Stockman (R-TX), whose on-the-job scarcity has become so pronounced that he is literally no longer able to sit through a single speech. (Assuming no bathroom troubles are involved on that one, my ongoing Stockman prediction remains "something involving rehab.") So Sen. Ted Cruz is redeeming himself in the eyes of his party in large part by not being as insane as Steve Stockman, that being the measure of things nowadays.

Since playing a lead role in the government shutdown last fall, Cruz has joined with Republicans on fights ranging from the Internal Revenue Service’s scrutiny of conservative groups to the Obamacare contraception mandate.

Please read below the fold for more on this story.

Since neither of those other things are particularly not insane, we might also note that the rest of the party is mostly just as ridiculous as Cruz.

In an olive branch to his colleagues, Cruz privately assured them he wouldn’t raise money for a conservative group attacking GOP senators.

Agreeing to not align yourself with efforts to defeat fellow Republican senators does seem like the absolute least one could do if you wanted to get along with those senators. Baby steps, I suppose.

And he even allowed the Senate to leave early for its Martin Luther King Jr. Day recess by dropping demands for what would have been a futile attempt to gut Obamacare.

LEADERSHIP.

While the 43-year-old Cruz is unapologetic about his role in the shutdown, a number of senators privately believe he was humbled by the backlash over his strategy, [...]

I dispute that "Ted Cruz humbled" is or ever has been a thing, but continue ...

which didn’t stop Obamacare — as he vowed — but resulted in poor poll numbers for the GOP and made him a pariah in the party establishment.

It will be interesting to watch if Ted McCarthy LeShutdown Cruz is able to better comport himself according to Republican needs to not appear overtly insane, or whether the rest of the party continues to slide far enough toward his own brand of insanity that he becomes "moderate" by standing still. No bets on that one.

Sen. Ted Cruz tries to be less insane. Let's watch.

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