Cruz Rips Senate For ‘Theater and Show Votes’ One Hour After Epic ‘Look-At-Me’ Speech

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It can be difficult to operate at full capacity when struggling with severe sleep deprivation, I know. Still, the complete lack of self-awareness that it takes for a person who just completed a 21-hour speech on the Senate floor (which accomplished nothing other than splashing his own name and face across every television, newspaper, and computer screen in America) to go on national radio just one hour later and say this is mind-boggling.

“A lot of folks have been in office way too long,” Cruz said during an interview on Rush Limbaugh’s show. “They have stopped listening to their constituents and as a result we see lots of theater, lots of symbolic votes and very little willingness to actually stand up and fight.” …

“We don’t even talk about how to win a fight,” he said. “We talk about, ‘hey lets have a show vote so we can go tell our constituents we are doing something.’ But I promise you, Rush, if you had to sit through one Senate lunch, you would be in therapy for a month.” 

Cognitive dissonance: it’s a thing.

It’s worth noting that most of Cruz’s comments are aimed at members of his own party, Senators his speech was ostensibly supposed to coerce into voting against cloture on a bill which includes his stated goal of defunding Obamacare. If you haven’t been paying enough attention for this to make a sense, here’s the thinking: After cloture, the Senate will be able to propose amendments. These will of course include a Democratic move to strip the bill of the Obamacare defunding. And, since that means ol’ Harry Reid won’t agree to require a super-majority of 60 votes for any amendments, that means the Democrats will win.

Now, even if Reid were to agree to the 60-vote requirement, and even if the Senate passed a clean version of the House bill, President Obama would certainly veto the bill. Republicans would then have to muster 67 votes in the Senate in order to defund Obamacare. This is simply not going to happen. And, despite Sen. Cruz’s oh-so-eloquent invocation of Nazis and slavery, anyone today saying that “this can’t be done” is abso-frickin-lutely correct.

So, if the numbers just aren’t there, if there is no way you can possibly achieve your goal, if your “filibuster” isn’t even a filibuster… then what can you possibly call what Ted Cruz just did other than theater? It may be theater of passion and conviction (and poor pop culture analysis), but it is theater none-the-less.

By: Sandi Behrns

Sandi Behrns is a noted policy nerd, new media & web developer, and consultant to progressive organizations and campaigns. She is a senior contributor to Liberaland, and the Executive Editor of Progressive Congress News.