by Ted Cruz
A second possibility was, admittedly, a bigger reach—requiring the beginnings of entitlement reform, to make modest fixes to those vital programs in order to make them more fiscally sustainable going forward. Harder, but very meaningful if we could get it done.
A third was attaching Pennsylvania senator Pat Toomey’s “Full Faith and Credit Act,” or what I call the Default Prevention Act. It addressed the bogeyman that President Obama puts forward—that we will default on our debt if the debt ceiling is not raised. Default, according to Obama, would result in a worldwide financial apocalypse.
Nobody wants a default. And even if the debt ceiling were not raised, no responsible president would allow a default. Each month, federal revenues are about $200 billion; federal debt payments are $30–40 billion. There is ample revenue to always, always, always pay our debts (assuming the president doesn’t try to scare the markets by threatening to force a default). So Senator Toomey’s bill expressly required the United States to always pay its debt no matter what, even if the debt ceiling isn’t raised. Even as good a demagogue as the president is, and even as terrible as Republicans typically are at communicating, it would be hard to say that Congress was risking default of the debt in order to pass legislation that would in fact make it impossible for us to ever default on our debt.
I urged other Republican senators to make their own suggestions. None was forthcoming. The response from the Republican leadership was firm—they didn’t want us to fight for anything. The House had surrendered, and we had to do so as well.
In exchange for another increase in the debt ceiling, they wanted nothing. They feared accusations that Republicans were willing to risk a default of the U.S. government. They feared bad press. They feared Obama. They feared pushing for anything that was hard. The great irony, of course, was that opposing an increase in the federal debt was an 80-20 issue in most polls. If we explained to the American people what we were doing—if we were honest with them instead of trying to trick them—I believed we could win the argument.
But it wasn’t about solving the debt. It was about self-preservation. One senator asked me directly, “Why do you want to throw five Republicans under the bus?”
“I don’t,” I replied. “It’s leadership that is asking you to jump under a bus. Every single one of you campaigned telling your constituents the same thing I did; all I’m asking is that you actually do what you told the voters you would do.”
The vote to move forward on the debt ceiling came the following day. Because Mike Lee and I had refused to change the rules, 60 votes were still needed. Ordinarily in the Senate, these votes take fifteen minutes. For this particular vote, fifteen minutes came and went. And there were only 59 “ayes”; there weren’t enough votes to give Obama the “clean” bill he wanted. I was hopeful that maybe Republicans would stand firm behind their convictions.
But something peculiar happened. Traditionally, when a senator casts a vote, the clerk of the Senate reads it aloud—either “Mr. Smith, aye,” or “Ms. Jones, nay.”
For this particular vote, however, the clerk was instructed not to read the votes aloud as they were cast.6 That meant the votes could be kept secret, so that the leadership could work on getting enough Republicans who voted against the debt ceiling motion to quietly switch their votes without anyone knowing.
The fifteen-minute vote stretched to an hour. Only four Republicans had voted yes; to win, the Democrats needed one more. Under ordinary rules, the Democrats had lost. But they didn’t look like losers to me. The Democrats were sitting back and smiling while our GOP leaders went out of their way to help Harry Reid and President Obama pass yet another increase to our massive federal debt.
Finally, after spending an hour leaning heavily on Republicans to switch their votes, the top two Republican leaders walked to the clerk and simultaneously voted in favor of the motion. Six other Republicans then followed suit, switching from “no” to “yes.”
All told, twelve Republicans voted with the Democrats. The remaining Republican senators, 33 of them, a majority of our conference, stood against out-of-control spending and the Obama administration. None of that mattered, however. The final result was that President Obama, Harry Reid, and House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, with the active complicity of the Republican leadership, were able to add trillions of dollars to the national debt—a bill that we are passing along to our children and grandchildren—while doing nothing whatsoever to control future spending.
We lost the battle over the debt ceiling, but that was just one skirmish in the fight to make D.C. listen.
Outside the Beltway, it is obvious to everybody that Washington is broken, that it’s not committed to solving the real problems we face. No matter what politicians say on the stump, it seems that when they get to Washington they almost always forget the people who elected them.
All across America, you hear the same thing, from Republicans, Democrats, Independents, and Libertarians: Our elected officials aren’t listening to us.
Regardless of which party is in power, government keeps growing, the lives of hardworking Americans keep getting harder, and the disconnect between the government and the American citizenry keeps getting greater.
The driving force in Washington on the left and the right is risk aversion. Folks in our nation’s capital perpetually grow the size and power of the government because that’s the easiest thing to do. Fighting for principle, fighting against a powerful media and even sometimes against popular big-spending proposals—well, that’s a lot harder. Far too much decision making revolves around lobbyists and the entrenched political powers, which means that the only way to enact meaningful change is to fundamentally change the rules.
In another context, the Silicon Valley tech community has seen this same fight repeatedly. Over and over again, we’ve seen disruptive apps that change the means of delivery of a good or service. And, inevitably, the existing providers fight back. They don’t want change. So, when an Uber or Lyft comes into a city, the incumbent taxi commissions inevitably fight tooth and nail to maintain the status quo.
Telling the truth in Washington, D.C., is a radical act. And it earns you the enmity of career politicians in both parties. When you tell the truth about Washington—when you expose the fact that elected officials are misleading the voters who elected them—you pay a price. It’s one thing to criticize the other party. But when you admit publicly that many of those in your own party are complicit in the problem, well, that’s when the long knives come out.
The leadership in Congress has two ways of punishing members who speak the truth. First, they go after the “lifeblood” of politics: money. Without campaign money, you cannot get elected, and you cannot get your message out. Especially in this modern media age, communicating is expensive. And so is connecting with and mobilizing the grassroots.
The first year that I was serving in the Senate, we saw considerable campaign donations come in from the corporate world; Texas is, after all, home to more Fortune 500 companies than any other state. Once I demonstrated that I would stand up to party leadership, that stopped—cold. Members of the GOP leadership made it clear to K Street lobbyists and political action committees that if they continued to support me, then they would be frozen out. Our PAC fund-raiser quit, under pressure from folks connected to the GOP leadership. They did the same thing to Mike Lee.
Want to know why so many elected officials listen to party bosses instead of their constituents? Washington is corrupt, and control over D.C. money is a big part of it.
Fortunately, my campaign was never dependent on financial support from giant corporations or K Street lobbyists. When I ran for Senate, almost all of them opposed me; after I was elected, we welcomed their support, but I never forgot for whom I was working.
As a grassroots candidate, our campaign contributions came instead from tens of thousands of citizens in all fifty states. They were young people, small business owners, little old ladies sending in five or ten dollars so
that we could stand together and change Washington. They weren’t susceptible to threatening phone calls from leadership aides. Cutting off our money wasn’t going to deter me from speaking the truth.
The second method of punishment the GOP elites use is public flogging. Anonymous quotes appear in Capitol Hill publications from unnamed Republican sources—they’re usually Republican leadership staff members—wielding nasty personal insults.
“[Democratic candidate for governor of Texas] Wendy Davis has more balls than Ted Cruz.”
“Ted Cruz came here to throw bombs and fund-raise off of attacks on fellow Republicans. He’s a joke, plain and simple.”
“He’s an amateur.” “A fraud.” “A hypocrite.” “A wacko bird.”
“Jim DeMint without the charm.”
All of those things were said by Republicans. And most of them were attributed to anonymous “senior GOP aides.”
The Republican leadership’s attacks are amplified and made more effective by using friendly media outlets. When leadership is displeased, they place hit pieces with journalists only too happy to cooperate. Indeed, so much so that one particular Politico reporter often seems like he is Mitch McConnell’s press secretary; nearly every attack from leadership gets echoed and amplified in his stories. As this reporter noted after one Senate lunch (apparently without irony): “The closed-door [Senate lunches] are supposed to be private . . . so senators interviewed for this article asked not to be named.”7
Of all the friendly media outlets for GOP leadership, none is more potent than the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. That page has built a remarkable legacy of defending free-market ideals and standing up to government power. In the 1970s and ’80s, legendary editor Robert Bartley helped set the stage for the many successes of the supply-side economics of Jude Wanniski, Jack Kemp, and Ronald Reagan.
Whenever congressional leadership is particularly exercised on a topic, it usually takes about seventy-two hours for the Journal editorial page to unleash that same attack in the most important space in journalism.
Thus, a couple of days—like clockwork—after the battle on the debt ceiling, the Journal penned a blistering editorial titled “The Minority Maker.” Now, one might think that the Wall Street Journal would be concerned about our $18 trillion debt, and dismayed that Congress had not even tried to check the administration’s profligate spending. But no, the Journal’s concern was different, namely that my fighting on the debt ceiling had made Republican leadership look bad.
Mirroring the words of Senate Republican leaders, the Journal intoned: “We’re all for holding politicians accountable with votes on substantive issues, but Mr. Cruz knew he couldn’t stop a debt increase the House had already passed. He also had no alternative strategy if the bill had failed, other than to shut down the government again, take public attention away from ObamaCare, and make Republicans even more unpopular.”8 (As history showed, the editorial’s central premise—that the fight on the debt ceiling would make it far more likely Harry Reid and the Democrats would keep control of the Senate—was somewhat in conflict with the actual results of the 2014 election.)
That was the first shot. The next day, our office received a call from an editorial writer at the Journal who was writing a follow-up piece on the very same topic.
I spent more than an hour on the phone with the writer, arguing that any effort to use the debt ceiling to force spending reforms was far from useless. We could get concessions from Obama, as Mitch McConnell and others had asserted only days earlier. I had no desire to tilt at windmills, I explained on the call, but their premise—that we could never succeed—was belied by the facts. In some sense, I understood where the Journal was coming from. They thought my tactics were myopic, as the GOP leadership had no doubt convinced them. But I observed that any responsible journalist, even if he or she thought my position was a political blunder, would have to at least acknowledge that the debt ceiling has historically been the best leverage that Congress has on spending; indeed, Congress had attached meaningful conditions to 28 of the last 55 debt ceiling increases. It had proven true even with President Obama and Harry Reid. Just one year earlier they had been forced to agree to the Budget Control Act through the leverage of the debt ceiling.
The crowning moment of our telephone exchange was when the writer asserted that every single Republican strongly opposed raising the debt ceiling without any spending reforms. My response seemed to baffle her: “If you lead the fight to pass something . . . then you don’t oppose it.”
Alas, the conversation proved fruitless. Neither of the Journal’s editorial pieces had any acknowledgment of the historical efficacy of using the debt ceiling for leverage. Instead, they simply asserted that resistance was futile.
As intended, this double hit in the press had its effect—especially in the business and donor community. It was here where I made a mistake—I didn’t realize how effective the media attacks, especially in the conservative media, would be. Over and over again, I had to explain myself to people who usually were on our side, especially because the attacks from supposed Republican allies often inverted what was actually happening. For example, just after the debt ceiling fight, Bob Woodward went on one of the Sunday shows and said, “Mitch McConnell . . . thinks that Cruz is literally the most selfish senator he’s ever seen.” There was almost a Freudian projection at work here. It seems to me that the “selfish” thing for me to have done would have been to go along to get along: go to the Washington parties, raise money, stay in office for life, and never rock the boat. Who in their right mind would “selfishly” choose to endure the vilification, the personal and nasty attacks? In the curious lexicon of Washington, what is perceived as “selfish” is doing what you said you would do: honoring your commitments to your constituents. Because, I suppose, that selfishly makes it uncomfortable for others who do not wish to do the same.
The typical Washington response would be for me to fight back, to fight fire with fire. To insult my colleagues, to plant nasty stories and give anonymous quotes smearing those on the other side. But I’m not willing to play that game. It’s wrong, and it’s not what Texans elected me to do. Instead, when the attacks come my way, I have not reciprocated. What I have done and what I intend to continue to do is speak the truth and explain how money and power in Washington conspires to create even more money and power for the politically connected at the expense of the hardworking taxpayers.
If I had it to do over again, I would have made a bigger effort to inform my supporters and impartial journalists of what actually happened. But I foolishly thought the facts were so abundantly clear that the media would accurately describe what was happening.
As I reflected on the situation, I was struck by the fact that many of the weapons used against me—mischaracterizations of motivations, attacks in the press, efforts at ostracism—are very similar to how many Washington Democrats and Republicans have greeted the tea party, the millions of conservative activists who rose up in response to the out-of-control spending, debt, and government power in the Obama era.
Many reporters like to discuss the Republican Party as currently divided between the tea party and the establishment. But that line misunderstands what is actually going on. The biggest divide in politics is not between the tea party and the establishment. It is not even between Republicans and Democrats. The biggest divide is between career politicians—in both parties—and the American people.
There is a fundamental corruption in Washington—those in power get fatter and happier while the rest of America suffers as a consequence of their policies. I’ve seen it firsthand. The counties surrounding the nation’s capital—where most legislators and lobbyists live—are soaring in median income, while the median income for American families has stagnated nationwide. Indeed, five of the six wealthiest counties in the entire country are suburbs of Washington.
In the Roaring Twenties, Calvin Coolidge memorably observed, “the chief business of the American
people is business.” Well, the chief business of Washington is government, and in today’s climate, business is good. But, in the rest of the country, we have the lowest percentage of Americans working since 1978.
Instinctively the American people understand they are being lied to by their elected officials when these officials protest they are working to right our fiscal predicament. The people may not know exactly what procedural game is being played, but they understand we don’t pile up an $18 trillion debt without a whole lot of bipartisan cooperation and collusion.
Some months after the debt ceiling debate, I attended a fund-raising dinner in California with a self-described moderate Republican donor who was decidedly skeptical of the radical tea partier that he believed me to be.
But as I described what was happening in Washington, and as I related the story of the debt ceiling just as I’ve done here, I could see a change in his expression. The change became more pronounced as I detailed the duplicity of the Republican establishment.
Over dessert, I described the Republican leadership’s argument that we should all affirmatively consent to lowering the threshold for Harry Reid to raise the debt ceiling, because then we could all vote no and tell our constituents we actually opposed what we had just consented to allow happen.
Quietly, almost under his breath, he whispered, “The bastards.” He repeated those words three times.
