Al Franken, Giant of the Senate

by Al Franken

  It was just an unqualified, unequivocal “No I didn’t.”

  And that’s when I realized that Ted Cruz was really something special.

  During the Judiciary Committee’s first hearing on the assault weapons ban, Ted had engaged in his own odious brand of sophistry. First, he said this:

  The assault weapons ban that used to be in effect, according to the Department of Justice, quote, “failed to reduce the average number of victims per gun murder incident or multiple gunshot wounds victims.”

  A 1999 summary of the 1997 report did say that. But that’s very different from saying that the ban didn’t work. (In fact, the sentence immediately preceding the one Ted quoted said, “Evidence suggests that the ban may have contributed to a reduction in the gun murder rate and murders of police officers by criminals armed with assault weapons.”)

  Ted continued:

  Now, that is the assessment of the United States Department of Justice, and that is in 1994 [sic].* That was the Janet Reno Department of Justice under President Clinton that said the assault weapons ban was singularly ineffective.

  No. The report said nothing of the kind. The Microsoft Word thesaurus, which is even easier for me to consult while writing than the one built into Google, lists the following words as synonyms for “singularly”: “unusually,” “especially,” “exceptionally,” “rarely,” and “surprisingly.” So Cruz was saying that the DOJ had called the assault weapons ban “exceptionally ineffective.” Of course, not only does the report say no such thing, but it repeatedly makes the exact opposite point, which was that there was not yet enough evidence to draw any conclusive determination.

  Ted was being singularly dishonest. And exceptionally smarmy.

  After our hearings on the assault weapons ban, we went into executive session to mark up the bill. When it came time for Ted to speak, he treated us all to a breathtakingly patronizing lecture directed at Senator Feinstein, who had been in the Senate for twenty years, compared to Ted’s two months.

  After helpfully reminding Dianne that the Constitution is our foundational document and that the First and Second Amendments of the Constitution are part of the Bill of Rights, Ted went in for the kill:

  And the question that I would pose to the senior senator from California is, would she deem it consistent with the Bill of Rights for Congress to engage in the same endeavor that we are contemplating doing with the Second Amendment in the context of the First or Fourth Amendment?

  Namely, would she consider it constitutional for Congress to specify that the First Amendment shall apply only to the following books, and shall not apply to the books that Congress has deemed outside the protection of the Bill of Rights?

  You get what he was trying to say, right? The bill would have outlawed assault weapons, while leaving other guns legal. And Ted was suggesting that this was equivalent to selectively banning books.

  If this sounds like a very private-school-debate-club way to talk about gun safety, please rest assured that it was delivered in the most private-school-debate-club tone possible. Like an actor performing a monologue in which he plays an intolerably smug, self-righteous high school debater in a blue blazer with brass buttons, but way, way overdoing it. Ted’s condescension hung in the air like the stench from a cat box in an apartment with forty cats belonging to an elderly woman who had just been found dead. It was bad, is what I’m saying.

  Dick Durbin jumped in. “Would the senator yield for a question?”

  But Dianne wanted to respond herself. “Let me just make a couple of points in response. One, I’m not a sixth-grader.” Barely containing her anger, she reminded Ted that not only had she been a member of the Judiciary Committee for twenty years, but before that, she had been the mayor of San Francisco—an office to which she had ascended when her predecessor, George Moscone, was assassinated (along with Supervisor Harvey Milk).

  In fact, Dianne had been the one who discovered Harvey Milk’s body. “I’ve seen the bullets that implode,” she growled at Ted.

  Dianne finished by assuring Ted that she was familiar with the Constitution and sarcastically thanking him for the lecture. There was a sort of stunned silence. Then Chairman Leahy noted that Dick Durbin had asked for the floor.

  “Mr. Chairman,” said Dick, “I can’t add anything to that.”

  But Ted could! Instead of dissolving into a fine pink shame-mist, he piped up to clap back at the distinguished public servant who had just taken him to the woodshed.

  “I would note,” he oozed, “that the senior senator from California did not answer my question, which is: In her judgment, would it be consistent with the Constitution for Congress to specify which books are permitted and which books are not?”

  “Well,” I chimed in, “I’ve got a book that I don’t think the First Amendment would permit. It’s called Ted Cruz Is a Pedophile. That would be libel. Unless, of course, you are a pedophile. Which we don’t know.”

  No, I didn’t say that. But, man, I wanted to. And I kind of wish I had.

  Around that time, Amy Klobuchar was preparing to speak at the Gridiron Club dinner, an annual black-tie affair held by the oldest and most prestigious organization for journalists in Washington. Traditionally, the president gives humorous remarks, as do two members of Congress, one from each party.

  For the record, Amy doesn’t let me write jokes for her. That way, if someone asks her if I wrote any of her jokes, she can honestly say “no.” Besides, Amy’s really funny, and can fend for herself. But sometimes she’ll run her jokes by me, and every once in a while I’ll have a suggestion on how to punch up one or two.

  Now, this was in early March 2013, just a couple weeks after a Carnival cruise ship had been towed into harbor after almost a week stranded at sea because of an engine fire. The ship had been nicknamed “the poop cruise” because passengers said the hallways were flooded with human waste.

  Which had inspired a joke that Amy ran by me: “When most people think of a bad cruise, they think of Carnival. But we think of Ted.” I thought that was pretty good, but suggested a rewrite, which I’ll get to in a moment.

  The Thursday before the Gridiron, as we were taking a series of votes on the floor, I noticed Amy going around to a few senators she had written jokes about. “Ah,” I thought, “Amy’s getting their blessing.”

  Then I saw her walk up to Ted. “Hmm,” I thought. “This could be interesting.” So I went right over and inserted myself into a conversation triangle.

  “Ted,” Amy smiled, “I’ve written a joke about you for the Gridiron, and I wanted to get your okay.”

  “Sure,” Ted smiled back. “What’s the joke?”

  “Well,” Amy smiled, “here it is: ‘When most people think of a difficult cruise, they think of Carnival. But we Democrats in the Senate think of Ted.’”

  I noticed, of course, that she had softened the joke a bit, changing “a bad cruise” to “a difficult cruise” and changing “we think of Ted” to “we Democrats in the Senate think of Ted.”

  Ted smiled. Then he offered a suggestion. “What if you changed ‘a difficult cruise’ to ‘a challenging cruise’?”

  Oh my God. What a putz! Now the joke isn’t funny. I could tell that Amy was thinking the same thing. And so could Ted. So before Amy could respond, he smiled even more broadly and said magnanimously, “I’ll tell you what. I believe in the First Amendment. You go ahead and tell your joke.”

  Wow, that was patronizing! I decided to step in.

  “Say, Ted.” I smiled. “I did a rewrite of Amy’s joke, and I think it’s a lot better. Want to hear it?”

  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Amy having two successive thoughts:

  1. “Oh no—Al’s not going to do this!”

  2. “But I definitely want to be here if he does.”

  Ted was still smiling. “Sure!”

  “Okay. Here it is: ‘When most people think of a cruise that’s full of shit, they think of Carnival. But we think of Ted.”

>   And there went Ted’s smile. For once, he had no words.

  I nodded, turned around, and walked away.

  Keep in mind, this all happened within two months of Ted’s arrival in Washington. There are senators who take six months slowly getting to know people and getting to know the institution before they even make their first floor speech, let alone manage to convince every other senator to hate them. Ted wasted no time pissing everybody off—including his fellow Republicans.

  A couple weeks before the gun debate, the Armed Services Committee had held a hearing on Chuck Hagel’s nomination to be defense secretary. Now, it wasn’t unusual for a Republican senator to give an Obama appointee a hard time, but Chuck Hagel was a former Republican senator from Nebraska—the Republican side of the dais was packed with senators who had known and worked with and respected Hagel for decades.

  But Ted decided to deliver another Cruzian performance piece, questioning the source of payments that Hagel had received for speaking engagements after leaving the Senate and making an inflammatory insinuation: “It is, at a minimum, relevant to know if that $200,000 that he deposited in his bank account came directly from Saudi Arabia, came directly from North Korea.”

  Yeah. Just like it would be relevant to know if you were a pedophile, Ted. But at least I had the good taste not to say that out loud, but instead to write it in a book five years later.

  Republicans were at least polite about brushing back the brash new senator, with Lindsey Graham saying Cruz’s remarks were “out of bounds.” Democrats and the media were less restrained, comparing Ted’s intimation to McCarthyesque innuendo.

  It takes a special kind of jerk to get compared to Joe McCarthy just a month into your Senate career. Although it didn’t help Ted that he bears more than a passing resemblance to McCarthy himself. (Franni thinks he’s the love child of McCarthy and Dracula.)

  Of course, Ted had been leaving a bad taste in people’s mouths his whole life. His college roommate, screenwriter Craig Mazin, had been warning people about Cruz since the moment he leapt onto the national stage in the 2012 election, and when Ted ran for president in 2016, Mazin was only too happy to share some memories of what Young Ted Cruz had been like.

  “As a freshman,” he tweeted one day, “I would get into senior parties because I was Ted’s roommate. OUT OF PITY. He was that widely loathed. It’s his superpower.”

  Keep in mind, this is at Princeton. Ted Cruz was too much of a smug jerk to fit in at Princeton. And then he went to Harvard Law School, where during his very first week he created a study group. Hey, that’s kind of human! Except that in order to apply to be part of Ted’s study group, you had to have gone to Harvard, Princeton, or Yale for college. GQ interviewed Ted’s law school roommate, who explained, “He said he didn’t want anybody from ‘minor Ivies’ like Penn or Brown.”

  If I spent a thousand years on a desert island, I couldn’t come up with a more obnoxious way to show my new classmates that I was a world-class butthole.USS

  I could fill several chapters with Ted Cruz awfulness. But I’ll end with one of my favorite photographs from my time in the Senate. It was taken during an especially long and tedious executive session of the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, during which we discussed and voted on Tom Udall’s proposed constitutional amendment to overturn the Citizens United decision.

  The amendment would have simply restored the power of Congress and the states to “regulate and set reasonable limits on the raising and spending of money by candidates and others to influence elections.” Such laws, of course, had existed for many years before the Supreme Court decided to wipe them all out with a 5–4 vote.

  Ted opposed this, of course, and spoke against it in pieces that added up to a good hour, making bogus point after bogus point, which was why the hearing was so long and tedious. “This amendment here today,” he said at one point, “would repeal the free speech protections of the First Amendment.” And, “This amendment, if adopted, would give Congress absolute authority to regulate the political speech of every single American, with no limitations whatsoever.” And, later, “Any politician who put his or her name to an amendment taking away the free speech rights of every American, in my view, should be embarrassed.” Stuff like that.

  He also tied together his blatant disregard for the truth, his relentless appetite for grandstanding, and his cringe-worthy habit of making pop culture references in an argument that seemed designed just to irritate me, referring to the political satire on Saturday Night Live, specifically Tina Fey playing Sarah Palin. According to Ted, if Citizens United were to be reversed, Tina would not have been able to do her Sarah Palin on the show, because NBC is a corporation.

  Of course, as I pointed out, Tina did Sarah Palin during the 2008 election—two years before the Citizens United decision. Danny Aykroyd did Carter before Citizens United. Phil Hartman did Reagan. Dana Carvey did George H. W. Bush. Hartman did Clinton. As did Darrell Hammond. And Will Ferrell did George W. Bush. All before Citizens United.

  So even if you bought Ted’s bogus argument that preventing corporations from pouring billions of dollars in dark money into shadowy Super PACs was equivalent to outlawing any political speech on the public airwaves, this wasn’t even a relevant example. It was just a dishonest and unpleasant man trying, and failing, to use pop culture to make a false argument. In fact, a few months later he made the same argument in a floor speech, where he added, “Lorne Michaels could be put in jail, under this amendment, for making fun of any politician.”

  Ted Cruz isn’t just wrong about almost everything. He’s impossible to work with. And he doesn’t care that he’s impossible to work with. And that’s why, even when the choice was between Ted Cruz (who was a sitting member of the United States Senate) and Donald Trump (who was Donald Trump), establishment Republicans couldn’t bring themselves to rally behind Cruz. Even if you like what he stands for, the most he’ll ever be able to accomplish is being an obnoxious wrench in the gears of government (like when he led the government shutdown over the Affordable Care Act). Real senatoring requires that you build productive relationships with your colleagues. And Ted just isn’t that kind of guy.

  Which reminds me, here’s the picture from that hearing. When Josh Riley left the Senate, he had it printed out and framed for me as a gift. The picture, as his inscription explained, is worth a thousand words of sophistry.

  And it sort of captures perfectly what it’s like to work with Ted Cruz.

  Chapter 38

  Bulletproof

  After the massacre at Sandy Hook, a number of my Republican colleagues responded by saying something on the order of, “This isn’t just about guns. It’s about the culture and mental health.” As someone who’d been working on mental health issues since I got to the Senate, I knew that a number of these colleagues had never before expressed any interest in the subject. It was like they were checking off a box by saying the words “mental” and “health” and saying them in the right order.

  Even worse, by raising mental health only in the context of gun violence, they were stigmatizing mental illness. The shooters in Newtown and Aurora and Tucson and Orlando were demented. And of course early intervention can help avert some acts of violence. But the fact is that people with mental illness are on the whole no more likely to be violent (and are actually more likely to be victims of violence) than the general population.

  Virtually every family in America is touched by a behavioral health problem—mental illness or addiction. Addressing these issues in a smart, comprehensive, and compassionate way will relieve suffering, save families and lives, give us a more productive workforce, save tons of money in law enforcement and our prisons and in emergency room visits, and, yes, maybe prevent someone from becoming so psychotic that they shoot up a movie theater, or a nightclub, or an elementary school.

  My friend Paul Wellstone was profoundly affected by watching his brother struggle with depression. And one of his Republican colleagues, New Me
xico’s Pete Domenici, was profoundly affected by his daughter’s schizophrenia. So in the Senate they teamed up to try to help Americans get the care they need.

  Back then, one barrier to getting that care was the exceptionally high cost of treatment. Many health insurance plans would cover surgery for a broken arm, but not medication for crippling anxiety or treatment for a drug addiction. Mental health issues were seen, at least within the health insurance market, as somehow less important, or less real—or, in any case, less worthy of coverage.

  Wellstone and Domenici tried to change that by fighting for what was known as “mental health parity,” which would simply require insurance plans that cover mental health services to cover them to the same extent as medical and surgical services. This extremely simple, extremely commonsense, extremely humane reform didn’t become law until October 2008. Yup: Paul Wellstone’s most meaningful legislative achievement came six years after his death.

  The fight to pass the Wellstone-Domenici Mental Health Parity and Addiction Equity Act was led in the House by Democrat Patrick Kennedy of Rhode Island and Republican Jim Ramstad of Minnesota. Both are recovering alcoholics. But Patrick had the harder road to recovery.

  John F. Kennedy wrote a book called Profiles in Courage, but to me, the family’s greatest profile in courage may well be Patrick. He never let his own very public and very embarrassing struggles with addiction and mental illness keep him from fighting to help others with mental health and addiction disorders get the care they needed.

  My own interest in mental health issues came partly from how much I respected Paul’s work on the issue and partly because, as you may recall, I, too, had been affected by loved ones who suffered from a behavioral disease: alcohol and chemical addiction.