Ted Cruz came to Washington two-and-a-half years ago pledging to be the anti-senator. But he’s been more like the no-show senator.

The Texas Republican seriously lags most of his colleagues in attending hearings and casting votes in what has been a Senate career long on rhetoric and short on Senate business.


He’s skipped the vast majority of Armed Services Committee hearings, is below-average in attendance on his other major committees and ranks 97th during the first three months of this year in showing up for roll call votes on the Senate floor.

It’s a record that Cruz himself seemed to proudly telegraph when he was running for office. Appearing before the Houston Pachyderm Club in the summer of 2012, he answered a charge by a Texas newspaper that he wouldn’t get along with his colleagues or committee chairs by telling the crowd, “Guilty as charged.”

His attendance record is so poor that his just-launched presidential campaign could be a referendum, as several senior colleagues suggested, on the proper responsibilities of a senator.

In his first two years in the Senate, Cruz attended just 17 of 50 public Armed Services Committee hearings for which there are transcripts — the second-to-worst attendance record on the 26-member panel. He skipped more hearings than former Sens. Kay Hagan of North Carolina and Mark Udall of Colorado, who lost reelection bids last year after being criticized for their poor attendance records.

On Cruz’s other two major committees, transcripts point to a similar pattern. Cruz attended four of the 12 Judiciary Committee hearings during the previous 113th Congress for which there are official transcripts available. It’s a small sample, but the average senator attended six.

Cruz’s aides say he attended half of the Judiciary full-committee hearings held during the 113th Congress — 20 of 40 — but their analysis doesn’t include the many executive business meetings and judicial confirmation hearings held by the panel. His aides’s numbers are also impossible to verify because there are no official transcripts for most Judiciary hearings.

On the Commerce Committee, Cruz participated in just three of the 25 full-committee hearings during the 113th Congress for which there are official transcripts. The average committee member participated in nearly seven.

He also missed 21 of 135 roll call votes during the first three months of this year, the third-worst record among all senators — skipping votes on aid for Israel, student loans and human trafficking, among others. According to a February analysis by the website Vocativ, Cruz had the fifth-worst record among current senators when measured over the course of their careers. Another website, GovTrack, put him in the bottom 20th percentile for the 113th Congress, covering all of 2013 and 2014.

Cruz’s communications director, Amanda Carpenter, attributed the missed votes during the 113th Congress to Cruz’s trip to attend Nelson Mandela’s funeral and a Fort Hood memorial in Texas, along with delayed flights and other reasons.

Last month, Cruz dismissed concerns about all the Armed Services Committee hearings he’s missed over the past few months by saying he’s been busy planning a presidential campaign. But a POLITICO review has found that his attendance problems date back to his first few months as a senator in 2013, when he skipped congressional hearings on immigration, the war in Afghanistan and across-the-board spending cuts.

Another senator running for president, Republican Marco Rubio of Florida, has also been cited for a poor attendance record. In fact, in the Vocativ analysis, he had a higher rate of missed votes than any other senator, including Cruz. Rubio’s office issued a statement to The Miami Herald saying he “takes his responsibilities as both a senator and a father seriously,” and that the “vast majority” of the missed votes occurred when he was attending to parenting responsibilities back home in Florida.

But Cruz, for his part, seems almost to advertise his poor attendance as a sign of his willingness to buck the system.

“Sen. Cruz remains incredibly active on the issues important to the 27 million Texans he represents and takes care to make sure his constituents know where he stands on these matters,” Carpenter said in a statement. “In a short time, Sen. Cruz has become a leading voice in our debates about commerce, constitutional rights and national security and will continue advocating ways to make Americans more prosperous and free.”

Votes and hearings aren’t the only measure of a senator’s performance, she said, explaining that Cruz also “regularly meets with constituents and Texas organizations, introduces legislation, offers amendments, goes on CODELS, writes letters, issues statements and engages in other actions in his capacity as a U.S. senator.”

Senior colleagues on the Armed Services Committee — a plum perch from which senators such as John McCain (R-Ariz.), Jack Reed (D-R.I.), and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) have prided themselves on having a serious impact on U.S. defense policy — agreed that attendance at Armed Services hearings is an important way to exert influence.

McCain, the committee chairman, said the first-term senator’s attendance issues are “between Sen. Cruz and his constituents.” But, the senator added with a wink, “I would imagine that that’s an item of consideration for the voters.”

Graham, who’s weighing his own bid for the GOP presidential nomination, said each of the senators mounting campaigns for the White House will “have to make some decisions about our day jobs.”

“I’m going to miss some votes,” said the senator, who attended 31 of the Armed Services Committee’s 50 public hearings in 2013 and 2014. “I’m trying to make sure they’re more procedural in nature. I’m going to miss some hearings. But I try to stay on top of my day job the best I can, so I’m not going to criticize Ted.”

Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, who was the top Republican on the Armed Services panel during the 113th Congress and attended 48 of the committee’s 50 public hearings, said the committee deals “with issues that are life and death issues in many cases.”

“At the committee hearings, you’re forced to get in a little more depth than you would otherwise,” he explained, “and that’s the reason I go.”

And Reed, who’s now the committee’s top Democrat and attended 42 of the 50 hearings during the 113th Congress, said “the question is what are the conflicting priorities. My judgment was that these are very important.”

For Cruz, another priority has been speaking out on conservative causes around the country — a clearly different way to leverage his influence as a senator and, not coincidentally, pump up his name recognition among the kind of activists who can propel a campaign for higher office.

For instance, on March 6, 2014, Cruz was at National Harbor, Md., roaring to an audience of defense-minded conservative voters organized by Breitbart News about U.S. missteps in dealing with Iran, Israel and the bloody civil war in Syria. “What this administration doesn’t understand is that weakness and appeasement only invite military conflict,” he thundered.

Meanwhile, back on Capitol Hill that day, other members of the Armed Services Committee were asking tough questions of the top U.S. general in the Middle East, covering violence in Syria, Pakistan and Afghanistan and the “perennial fight against Al-Qaeda,” according to transcripts.

The conservative firebrand’s attendance issues came to light last month when POLITICO reported that he’d attended just three of 16 public hearings held so far this year by the Armed Services Committee — making him the only one of the panel’s 26 members with an attendance rate this year below 50 percent.

Asked about the issue, Cruz blamed his presidential bid.

“When you’re putting together a campaign for president, like I’ve been, that entails a lot of time,” he told radio host Dana Loesch, as The Huffington Post reported at the time. “It’s not like I’ve been at the beach sipping a piña colada.”

POLITICO’s new review looked at full-committee hearings in 2013 and 2014 for which there are official transcripts released by the Government Publishing Office. Not included were subcommittee hearings and classified briefings. Transcripts for the Armed Services and Judiciary panels list members as present if they showed up at any point during hearings. For the Commerce Committee, members were counted as having participated in the hearings if they spoke at any time.

Attendance could be an issue on the 2016 campaign trail, especially for first-term senators like Cruz and Rubio who are seeking to stave off the perception that they’ve used the Senate as a springboard in their quests for the White House.

President Barack Obama, who like Cruz was in the Senate for two years before launching his bid for president, took heat in 2007 for missing 19 of 37 hearings held by the Veterans’ Affairs Committee during the 109th Congress, as a Daily Kos investigation found at the time.

And last year, Republican strategist Karl Rove brought up Obama’s attendance woes in an appearance on Fox News, saying the president should have been paying more attention to the then-growing backlog of veteran disability claims.

“These issues about scheduling and the backlog, these were discussed at Senate veterans committee meetings, and I’m not certain he was paying much attention then,” Rove told Fox host Greta Van Susteren. “He was probably busy out there running for president.”

Cruz has managed some legislative accomplishments in his two-plus years as a senator, despite his attendance problems.

Last year, for instance, the president signed into law a bill put forward by Cruz barring known terrorists from entering the United States as United Nations ambassadors — a measure designed to keep an Iranian diplomat out of the country. He also got an amendment included in the most recent National Defense Authorization Act making those killed or wounded in the 2009 Fort Hood shooting in Texas eligible for the Purple Heart.

But the vast majority of the 44 bills Cruz has authored appear to have little chance of becoming law anytime soon, including four to repeal or defund Obamacare.