Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) found himself in the most unusual place Thursday.
After more than 11 years as the senatorial fly in the ointment — driving his colleagues nuts with his insults and threats — Cruz racked up an overwhelmingly bipartisan 88-4 win for his bill. That’s the type of accomplishment usually reserved for the lions of the Senate whom he has regularly disparaged.
It’s been a whiplash moment for his colleagues, Republicans and Democrats alike, who have rarely seen Cruz take his Ivy League intellect and channel it into something so … bipartisan.
“Honestly, it’s been quite the sight. And we have teased him about it for the last couple of days,” Sen. Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), one of the more cordial Republicans in the chamber, said Thursday. “He has taken it well. But watching everybody kind of give him the berries in conference and then watch him try to bring all the groups together has been quite the sight.”
“I think it’s been helpful,” Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) said.
Shaheen and others do not necessarily believe this was a road to Damascus moment that will shift Cruz to acting like a Senate statesman all the time.
“I think it would be nice if we would all approach all pieces of legislation that way,” said Shaheen, who clashed a few years ago with Cruz over his partisan questioning of President Biden’s ambassador nominees.
The irony wasn’t lost on Cruz, who spent several recent days standing at the desk of Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), with whom he often has clashed vigorously. That desk is afforded to the top senators leading the debate on the floor, a spot that Cruz could find himself more frequently occupying if Republicans win the majority and he becomes chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee next year.
“No doubt, my colleagues enjoyed giving me grief over leading this bill to passage — I laughed as well, but I was also tempted to carve my name in the drawer as I managed the bill from Mitch’s desk,” Cruz said in a statement to The Washington Post.
All this form-shifting comes as Cruz is headed into a very expensive reelection campaign against Rep. Colin Allred (D-Tex.). Already, each candidate has raised more than $9 million in just the first three months of this year.
Cruz is favored to win in the right-leaning state, but his long-established reputation as a political villain will make it easier for Allred to raise funds. The race remains close enough that the incumbent will need to worry about appealing to the type of swing voters who do not usually align with his positions.
He’s no longer the completely brash 42-year-old who arrived in the Senate in January 2013 and announced his presidential bid a little more than two years later.
Now 53, Cruz faces a quandary of what to do with his career as he heads into what is the equivalent of senatorial middle age. Any future presidential races would come when he’s been in the Senate for at least 16 years, which would require him to have something to show for it beyond giving speeches.
In recent days, Cruz — the ranking Republican of the Commerce Committee — talked about his partnership with the chair, Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.), in working behind the scenes to essentially adopt about 200 amendments from dozens of senators to put into the underlying legislation.
He used his clout to support a provision mandating that Reagan National Airport open up five new long-haul flights, including one to San Antonio. Instead of lambasting this as the sort of local pork-barrel politics that Cruz used to deride, he talked about the joy of seeing three years of work with San Antonio officials come to fruition.
“Understandably, it is near and dear to my heart,” Cruz boasted during a Senate floor speech.
The techniques that Cruz and Cantwell used are now commonly deployed by other committee chairmen and ranking minority-party members on even bigger legislation.
They held hearings and legislative markups of the proposed bill, taking a deliberate process that stretched many months longer than the House’s consideration of the FAA legislation. Then they did what insiders call a “preconference” with their House counterparts, ironing out the differences between the two sides before the full Senate even considered the legislation.
This should make for easy passage of the bill when it hits the House floor in the coming days. That meant blocking the robust amendment process that Cruz and his allies usually demand, because any successful amendment might upend the deal with House leaders.
When one of his usual allies, Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), forced a vote meant to pry open the amendment process, Cruz stood strongly against it, telling his GOP colleagues in private that it was a bad idea. On the final vote, every GOP senator present cast their vote with Cruz.
The only four votes against the bill came from Virginia and Maryland’s Democratic senators who are opposed to additional flights out of National Airport.
Cruz’s colleagues have always known he can back up his Harvard Law pedigree with deep discussion on legal matters and policy. They also know he can be much less dogmatic in private than the fire-and-brimstone manner of his public appearances.
Many would like to see more of that private Cruz emerge in public.
“I think Senator Cruz is a very gifted individual,” Sen. Deb Fischer (R-Neb.) said Thursday, having just listened to what she considered a very good floor speech. “I hope he will continue down this path and be able to work with all of us and get some good things done for the American people, because he obviously has the talent to do it.”
He has shown brief flashes of this behavior. In 2021, during the debate on a massive infrastructure bill that he called “reckless” and voted against, Cruz worked with Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D-Ga.) to get a specific highway designation that would help connect military bases and rural communities along the proposed Interstate 14 corridor from Georgia through Texas.
A longtime resident of the Houston area, Cruz sounds downright giddy whenever he has the chance to boost NASA and its projects, which fall under the oversight of his committee.
But his antagonistic, sometimes obstructionist tendencies have always drawn the most attention. Cruz arrived in the Senate two years after Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Rand Paul (R-Ky.), and they served as the first tea-party-era senators who ousted establishment Republican favorites in their primaries. The trio have often linked arms in fierce debates, including the 2013 attempt to thwart the launch of the Affordable Care Act.
That turned into a more-than-two-week shutdown of the federal government and earned them the ire of most Republicans. In late 2020, after Biden’s clear victory over Donald Trump, Cruz and Lee worked with Trump’s legal advisers to help craft challenges to the outcome.
By Jan. 6, 2021, Lee backed out of that effort, which Cruz continued to lead. Even after Trump’s supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol, Cruz and seven others voted against certifying Biden’s win in two states.
Recent elections have added more than a half-dozen other deeply conservative senators to the ranks, but Cruz, Lee and Paul are hitting the maturation stage of their careers, at least in terms of seniority.
If Republicans win the majority in November, Cruz is likely to chair the Senate Commerce Committee and Paul will probably lead the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. Another likely scenario would hand the chair’s gavel of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee to Lee.
This FAA experience has given Cruz a fuller glimpse into how to work across the aisle. “When negotiating with other senators, I try to be transparent, honest, flexible and transactional,” he said in his statement to The Post.
His policy interests for this panel range from the bipartisan, particularly on several bills to protect children from online dangers, to the sharply partisan, such as when he questioned government agencies’ involvement with Big Tech during the 2020 election and the coronavirus pandemic.
His colleagues aren’t sure where Cruz will land, but they have a bit more hope.
“I suspect he’s seen both sides now, which is probably good for everybody,” Rounds said.
