Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) spoke to a Tea Party rally on Friday and provided a rare insight into the inner workings between Republican senators. Cruz told the audience at a FreedomWorks summit in Texas of what transpired following the recent gun control debate and votes on the Senate floor and said that constituents’ voices are being heard by unprincipled Republican Senators.
“When the votes came on the floor of the Senate, every single proposal in President Obama’s gun control agenda would have undermined the Second Amendment,” Cruz said. “Every single one of them was voted down on the floor of the Senate.”
The Texas senator said, “I’ve got tell you, the look of shock from the senior Democrats….they were convinced they had won.”
However, it was not just the Democrats that were awfully shocked. It turns out there were quite a bit of the “Good Old Boy” crowd of Republicans that got their feathers ruffled too. “I don’t know if there is an issue that has generated more heat internally in the Republican conference,” Cruz said candidly. “We have had probably five or six lunches with a bunch of Republican senators standing up and looking at Rand and Mike and me, and yelling at us at the top of their lungs. I mean they were really upset and they said, ‘Look, why did you do this? As a result of what you did, when I go home my constituents are yelling at me that I’ve got to stand on principle!’”
Laughter erupted as Cruz made that statement, and of course he smiled as did I when I heard him, but sadly this is no laughing matter. Cruz apparently thought people in the audience believed he was making up the claim, but he assured them that he “really wasn’t making that up.”
Senator Cruz didn’t even bother to argue with them, but let them pitch their temper tantrum and told them to “vote your conscience.”
He made the point that there are a lot of people that don’t want to be held accountable and that’s true. We’ve tried to hold people on both sides of the aisle accountable and we catch flack for that, but people have to hold elected officials, no matter the political label, accountable.
His apparently “unprincipled” colleagues continued, “Before you did this the politics of it were great. The Dems were the bad guys, the Republicans were the good guys; now we all look like a bunch of squishes.”
“Well, there is an alternative. You could just not be a bunch of squishes,” Cruz responded.
With that said, Senator Cruz and others like him have been quite refreshing to see in the Senate. Will he change over time? Maybe, especially if left in office for years and years. However, for now, he is standing on his principles in spite of the fact that he’s new there and he’s unwavering in standing against the establishment Republicans and Democrats and for that, he is drawing attention to the lack of accountability, and I might add corruption, in those that have been entrenched in the Senate for quite some time.
My hope is that Senators Cruz, Paul, and Lee will spark hope in future elected officials to take principled stands rather than attempt to play politics and simply let the chips fall where they may.
Tim Brown is the Editor of Freedom Outpost and a regular contributor to The D.C. Clothesline.
