Outfoxed

How McConnell "the Turtle" outfoxed Ted Cruz

Cruz can't get the best of the GOP stalwart.

By Burgess Everett

Ted Cruz called out Mitch "the Turtle" McConnell seven times by name on Monday night. Afterward, the Senate majority leader barely uttered a word about his chief Republican adversary.

Asked about Cruz’s diatribe on the Senate floor, during which the Texas Republican suggested McConnell is a puppet for Democratic leaders and a foe of conservatives, McConnell couldn’t conceal his smile on Tuesday.

“I have tried very hard to stay out of the presidential race, and I think that’s probably a good rule for me,” he said with a chuckle.

McConnell may not like to talk about Cruz, but he and his leadership lieutenants have quietly and methodically worked to isolate the conservative senator and minimize his effect on the critical fall spending debate. The end result, in spite of Cruz’s invective toward Republican leaders, is music to McConnell’s ears: no government shutdown.

“We had to be prepared,” said John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 3 Senate Republican. “He’s running for national office. He’s got a different endgame than we do. There are things we have to do here. We’ve got to fund the government every year.”

By moving to quarantine Cruz from the rest of the conference over the past three months, the majority leader demonstrated that he’s learned the lessons of the Cruz-backed government shutdown in 2013 and the Texas senator’s rogue strategy last winter that helped Democrats confirm a raft of judges in the lame duck session. In doing so, McConnell cemented his position atop the Senate GOP, dashing any hopes among House Republicans, or conservative activists, that his future might be in doubt.

The message is clear: McConnell isn’t going anywhere, and everyone in the Senate knows it. Even Cruz won’t say he should resign.

Still, that doesn’t mean controlling Cruz has been or will be easy, as the Texan tries to parlay his battles with GOP leadership into momentum for his presidential run. Congress is sure to face another shutdown cliff this winter, and Cruz has indicated he will once again try to blockade McConnell’s plans.

But in the latest shutdown scare, which will end on Wednesday, the leader and his team executed a coordinated strategy to box Cruz out, according to interviews with GOP leaders and aides.

McConnell ignored the chaos in the House that brought down Speaker John Boehner and decided to move his own funding bill, first with a provision defunding Planned Parenthood and then a “clean” bill that infuriated Cruz. But McConnell made his move well before the Sept. 30 deadline, limiting the procedural hijinks that Cruz could deploy.

Then on Monday, Republicans shut down Cruz’s effort to force a procedural vote he dubbed a referendum on McConnell’s leadership. Democrats even joined in, blocking his efforts to speak beyond the hour allotted to him.

A fellow GOP senator could have donated time to Cruz to allow him to speak, but GOP sources said there was little support for that idea. Cruz even said into a hot mic as he struggled for more air time that he wasn’t aware the fix was in.

“When I stood up, I didn’t know I was under a time limit,” Cruz said to Democratic and GOP floor staff late Monday.

By Tuesday, Cruz was still barred from again taking the floor, under the Senate’s byzantine rules, and was similarly prevented from offering another procedural motion to table McConnell’s clean spending bill.

“Avoiding disruption was the goal, and so that’s why that happened,” said Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, Cruz’s home state colleague and the No. 2 GOP leader. “It’s easy to make Washington and the establishment and leadership a punching bag. I don’t think there’s much mystery” behind Cruz’s motives.

It wasn’t always this way: In early dust-ups this year, Cruz played procedural hardball but stopped short of the personal insults he used later that turned his colleagues against him. The breaking point came in July, when Cruz called McConnell a liar for holding a vote on the Export-Import Bank, which many conservatives vehemently oppose.

Even then, McConnell bit his tongue, quietly urging senators not to take the floor in his defense, wary of giving Cruz a bigger platform for his GOP primary run.

“I was highly offended with the exhibition on the floor, Cruz calling [McConnell] a liar. If I’d have been here, I’d have him removed from the chamber,” said former Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.), himself a former majority leader. “He would have gotten more attention. Mitch probably handled it right.”

Lott knows something about handling political conflict, having moved as a member of the House to silence the late Speaker Tip O’Neill as he went after Newt Gingrich in 1984. But even then, the former GOP leader admitted, he’d never had to deal with anyone like Cruz.

“I had about a half a dozen more moderate senators that I have to work with. But they weren’t obstreperous, they didn’t call me a liar on the floor, they didn’t question my parenthood,” Lott said.

In his blistering speech on Monday, Cruz said that McConnell is “not willing to lift a finger” to take on Planned Parenthood or Iran and said that, despite massive GOP majorities, “Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi remain the de facto leaders in the Senate and the House.” He also accused McConnell of using an “unprecedented procedural trick” by denying Cruz a roll call protest vote on Monday, a move that was backed by the vast majority of the Senate GOP conference but opposed by Cruz and Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah.).

On Tuesday, the blackout continued, even though Cruz had beckoned voters to watch his attempt to again force a vote to disrupt the spending bill. But he couldn’t make this move without some agreement from his colleagues, and they were unwilling to give it to him.

“Ted has chosen to make this really personal and chosen to call people dishonest in leadership and call them names which really goes against the decorum and also against the rules of the Senate,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), a rival of Cruz’s for the GOP presidential nomination who has earned a tepid endorsement from McConnell, said on Fox News Radio. “As a consequence, he can’t get anything done legislatively. He is pretty much done for and stifled.”

Cruz declined to comment for this story when asked about the box-out by fellow senators. And perhaps there wasn’t much left to say: He’d again insulted McConnell by comparing him to Reid, boasted about Boehner’s downfall and exhausted his procedural leverage — leaving Cruz to tout his war against McConnell on the campaign trail.

“Everybody sort of wins. [Cruz] gets what he wants out of this, members are able to move forward,” said one Republican senator. “I would expect that from his point of view this works perfectly.”

But though McConnell doesn’t yet face dissent from Republican senators, the confluence of Cruz’s attacks and Boehner’s resignation have made him the next target of the right. The Senate Conservatives Fund, an outside group that spent big in a disastrous effort to unseat McConnell last year, has launched a campaign drive calling for his resignation, and House members say they are coming after the GOP leader after Boehner.

But Cruz won’t go that far, and neither will some of his most conservative colleagues. Acknowledging he is friends with McConnell, Paul declined to comment Tuesday on McConnell’s leadership. Lee, a more reserved ally of Cruz’s, wouldn’t directly comment on McConnell’s future.

“We typically hold leadership elections at the beginning of each session of Congress. Now is a good time for all Republicans to assess who we are, what we stand for, how we govern and, most importantly, how we are going to regain the trust of the American people,” Lee said.