U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz, Tea Partier extraordinaire from Texas, threatens to give impracticality, extremism, zealotry and grandstanding bad names.
That would send shock waves through the new Arkansas, where:
• Impracticality, extremism and zealotry have installed Tom Cotton in the U.S. Senate, effective next month.
• Grandstanding has re-installed Jason Rapert in the state Senate.
The congressional leadership of both parties and the White House had worked everything out Thursday and Friday. Sufficient numbers of House members and senators would vote to approve an omnibus spending bill for the rest of the federal fiscal year for everyone except Homeland Security.
That would keep the government from shutting down, which is an unsettling economic thing for the global markets and an unsettling political thing for whichever party gets accused more than the other of causing the shutdown.
Under the arrangement, Homeland Security's spending authority would end in March. That was so that the new and larger Republican majorities in place at that time could decide then what to do about spending--or not spending--on immigration and border services. That would be in response to President Barack Obama's executive orders de-emphasizing deportation of innocent immigrant children and their innocent immigrant parents.
The more conservative and more liberal members of Congress would be forced to swallow their respective resentments--conservatives that there was nothing in this solution to hinder Obama's executive orders immediately, and liberals because Citibank had dictated a rider to let it and other Wall Street banks start doing again certain sophisticated investment instruments that they've been having to farm out because those instruments had contributed to the near-ruination of our economy in 2008.
Conservatives like Cotton were free to rail against the omnibus bill over the immigration matter and vote in the minority against the bill. Liberals like U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts were free to rail against the omnibus bill over the Wall Street rider and vote in the minority against the bill.
Conservatives like Cotton could better fight again in March. Liberals like Warren could better fight again when the nation regains its senses.
It's the messy and sometimes distressing way politics works. You hold your nose. You don't let the perfect exist as the enemy of the good. Or the less bad.
As long as congressional leaders let lobbyists put self-serving verbiage in essential emergency spending bills, these kinds of odious asides will arise.
The House of Representatives passed the bill as expected Thursday night. Outgoing Senate majority leader Harry Reid and minority leader Mitch McConnell had a plan for senators to do preparatory procedural work on Friday, go home for the weekend and vote Monday to pass the bill.
That was where Cruz and his sidekick, U.S. Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, exercising their rights to object to procedural waivers, came in.
They declined to go along with the process. They wanted a separate, stand-alone vote on their resolution raising a point of order claiming Obama's executive orders on immigration were unconstitutional.
They were not so much motivated by opposition to the big banks' rider, though Tea Party people are supposed to be against bailing out Wall Street.
Cruz and Lee effectively forced the Senate to stay in session and work Saturday to wade through procedural steps, then vote on their point of order and then vote on the omnibus bill.
Senate Republicans were outraged. They saw no logic, purpose or remote advantage in Cruz's move--except, that is, to win him publicity. He couldn't stop the omnibus bill and he couldn't stop the executive orders. Republican senators pointed out Cruz seemed more forceful in public pronouncements than in private caucuses. They suspected Cruz was fundraising off his pointless tactic.
Beyond that, Reid had figured out that he could use the extra workday to push forward a few confirmations of Obama nominees who wouldn't otherwise be confirmed.
The Cruz-Lee proposal to make a point on immigration got voted down 22-to-74. Republicans voted against it by the dozens.
And then, of course, the omnibus budget bill passed.
Cruz and Lee accomplished the predictable nothing, except to give new hope to a few Obama nominees. That's what routinely will happen when a simpleton's tactics borrowed from Tea Party town-hall meetings and the vast wasteland of right-wing talk radio are injected into the formal legislative process.
Instead of showing us what kind of U.S. senator Rush Limbaugh would be, Cruz and Lee could have behaved as Elizabeth Warren behaved.
She railed against the big banks' offensive rider. She voted against the omnibus bill. But she short-circuited no process. She earned the respect of those in her party who voted the other way. She did not play into the hands of the opposing party or its leader. She made her point. She made no fool of herself.
We'll probably get another Bush-Clinton choice for president, though, as you can see, a Warren-Cruz contest would be infinitely more interesting.
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John Brummett's column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 12/16/2014