Miss chance

Cruz, Rubio miss chance to fight massive budget bill

As the presidential hopefuls were on the road campaigning, Mitch McConnell made his move.

By Burgess Everett

Senators have been wondering all week about the massive tax-and-spending bill — not so much whether it would pass, but whether Ted Cruz would keep them in town into Christmas week with stall tactics he's used before. Or even if Marco Rubio might try to slow it down, after floating the idea on Thursday morning.

But on Thursday afternoon, as Cruz and Rubio were out on the campaign trail railing against Congress' massive tax and spending deal, GOP leaders were moving swiftly to evade conservative opposition to the bill. Around 1 p.m., Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) strode to the floor to lock in a voting agreement for Friday that will give dissenters little time to speak and no way to stall the package absent a full-scale rebellion against McConnell.

The upshot is this: Cruz, and to a lesser extent Rubio and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), have lost their last chance before voting starts in the presidential primaries to take a stand against the Washington culture they say they despise. There will be no more critical, must-pass bills like this over the next few months.

On Thursday morning, Rubio (R-Fla.) went on Fox News to talk about the benefits of “slowing" the omnibus, suggesting that conservative Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) was mulling such a move. That was news to Sessions.

“Everybody has to make up their own mind. But I guess I usually don’t use those tactics unless I have a specific reason in mind,” said Sessions, who nonetheless hates the omnibus for not instituting more restrictive refugee policies.

One year ago, Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and Cruz objected to a similar voting agreement on a spending bill and forced their colleagues to return to the Senate on a Saturday after many lawmakers had left on Friday evening expecting to spend the weekend at home. The fact that no one objected to an even bigger year-end package approaching $2 trillion on Thursday had senators offering their own explanations of why Cruz, Rubio or Paul didn't think to fly back to D.C. to stand in the way of expedited consideration of the omnibus package.

Was it because Cruz has learned it doesn't pay to infuriate his colleagues?

“I don’t think I could go that far. They just had a debate this week. Their priority is campaigning,” said Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-N.H.), who missed attending a "Nutcracker" performance with her daughter last year after a conservative revolt against the bill derisively called the CRomnibus.

Others were more hopeful that maybe, just maybe, the internecine parliamentary wars led by Cruz on the Republican side were coming to an end.

“Senators are realizing that in a body of 100 that operates by unanimous consent, you have to learn to play well together or nobody gets anything done,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.). “We are playing a little better.”

But conservative aides said they’d been hoodwinked by McConnell’s maneuver to lock the vote in while Republican senators were eating lunch and Cruz and Rubio were on the trail.

Leadership "did not ask for consent like they normally do,” said one aide. They “asked if we wanted to speak and we said we did. This is shady."

Other Republicans said privately that the Senate sent through a "hotline" request that would allow anyone to object. There was no such objection.

Still, Washington leaders on both sides of the Capitol had braced for the surging Cruz in particular to seize the stage of the Senate and muck up their plans. They passed a stopgap bill this week funding the government to Dec. 22, more than enough time to prevent Cruz from shutting down the government even if he had performed a lengthy talking filibuster.

There’s no doubt that Cruz and Rubio, as well as many other conservatives in the House and Senate, hate the spending and tax deal. Cruz in particular has built his political persona and White House aspirations on confronting GOP leaders.

On Thursday, Cruz told John Fredericks on his radio show that he was a “hell no” on the package. At around the same time on Fox News, Rubio was asking the right to rise up against the omnibus bill.

“That process of slowing it down allows more Americans to wake up to the reality of what’s in the bill,” Rubio said.

The problem, according to senators and senior aides, is that Rubio and Cruz were not there to object to McConnell in person and could not get a fellow senator to register the objection on their behalf. Aides to the senators didn't call the Senate cloakroom to express an objection either, according to a senior Republican. Whether leadership was seeking to evade Rubio and Cruz’s objections or whether their skeleton Capitol Hill staffs simply missed their moment is in dispute.

What's not in question is that Rubio and Cruz could have blocked a Friday vote had they had been in Washington. Instead, Rubio was in Iowa Thursday, Cruz was in Las Vegas headed to Minnesota.

Conservatives had been hoping for a stronger show of opposition.

"I'd like to think that maybe three presidential candidates would join together" to fight the bill, said Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), who has endorsed Cruz. "If their voices came together in opposition to this, at least it would send a strong message to America."

And for senators not running for president and still in the Capitol, leaders were able to smooth over any objections by merely pointing to the calendar.

“You heard of this thing called Christmas?” Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Texas) said. “Everyone realizes the futility of stringing this thing out … any single senator could have blocked it, but they chose not to."