I really want you to read this Tierney Sneed piece about how immigration reformers are coming forward to dispute Ted Cruz’s account of where he was on immigration reform back in the key months of 2013. It’s become an issue because his account is at the center of a dispute between him and Marco Rubio. And that dispute is looking critical to determining which of these two freshman senators will get to be the alternative to Donald Trump going into 2016.
But here’s a point I want to highlight which is implicit but not openly stated in the piece. Remember that the key axiom of contemporary politics is this: everyone hates Ted Cruz. It looks like the reformers (and the hapless Rubio) have him pretty much dead to rights on this. But Cruz has zero good will from anyone. So they’re all happy to come forward and call him out as a bullshit artist and a liar. They don’t have to do that. But they’re happy to.
It’s not unlike that momentary controversy over whether Cruz had released classified information during the debate. Those kinds of claims are basically always bogus. But a top senate intelligence staffer called him out about it on twitter and the Republican chairman of the intel committee said the committee would investigate whether Cruz had in fact released classified information.
By the end of the day, they were saying they were done with it. They wouldn’t investigate Cruz. But again, there’s absolutely no reason for a committee chair, certainly not from the intel committee and certainly not from Cruz’s own party, to say something like that publicly. These things happen because absolutely no one likes Ted Cruz. And as he gets into the top tier, with so much at stake, it’s starting to hurt him.
