The last time I interviewed Ted Cruz, the freshman senator from Texas, was in October, about a week after the end of the federal government shutdown. Official Washington was just getting back to business as usual, and a clutch of woolly-looking protesters were chanting outside Cruz’s office in the Dirksen Senate Office Building. Cruz himself was running a little late that morning, and when I was finally ushered into his office, he warned me that he might be grumpy, because he was sick. It was the day before Halloween, and as I set up my recorder, I tried to make small talk—which was, as always, a thankless exercise..

“Do you have a costume?” I asked.

“No,” Cruz said. “I have in past years,” he added, gamely. “But I don’t...” he trailed off.

“What was your best costume of all time?”

“I’ve done Zorro,” Cruz said, and sighed. “Zorro wasn’t bad. I’ve done Phantom of the Opera.” He paused, apparently looking for something else to say. “They’re certainly similar.”

This was typical of my experience. I had spent hours with Cruz last year, interviewing him for a long profile in Texas Monthly. We talked in Washington in July, when he wasn’t considered much more than a Tea Party pest, newly elected and quoting Ludwig von Mises; in Waco in August, while he was traveling around Texas promoting the effort to defund the Affordable Care Act; in Houston in October, shortly after the end of the shutdown that he had arguably helped start; and several other times. Regardless of the circumstances, each time I tried to make small talk with him, it was boring. I was bored. And he seemed bored too, as he dutifully fielded my questions, trying and often failing to turn up interesting answers.

In this respect Cruz, in person, proved to be quite different from the Cruz we’ve seen on the national stage, the polarizing phenomenon most famous for his 21-hour stop-Obamacare-or-else pseudo-filibuster last fall. I found him to be pleasant, buttoned-up and even a little bland. It was only when asked about politics, policy or the law that he came to life: ferociously smart, talkative, engaged. Critics see the senator as a loudmouth, a firebrand and a loose cannon—which is not surprising given that Cruz spent much of his first year in the Senate offending his colleagues, Republican and Democrat alike, in battles over gun control (“I am not a sixth grader,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein snapped at him), immigration reform, Chuck Hagel’s nomination for secretary of defense and, of course, Obamacare.

Just last week, Cruz picked another fight with his own caucus. Although Democrats control the Senate, he announced, they would have to convince at least five Republicans to join them in supporting a bill to raise the debt ceiling or else he would delay the bill by filibustering. In doing so, he raised the ire of colleagues like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who was forced to vote to forestall the filibuster—and might take some heat back home for doing so.

Fightin’ Words Cruz has never gone easy on his fellow Republicans. On the debt ceiling vote: "Today's vote is yet another example that establishment politicians from both parties are simply not listening to the American people. … Some members of Congress care so much about being praised by the Washington media that they're willing to mortgage our children's future.” —Feb. 12, 2014 On his threatening to filibuster Democratic gun legislation: “We’ve had probably five or six lunches with a bunch of Republican senators standing up and looking at Rand [Paul] and Mike [Lee] and me and yelling at us at the top of their lungs … ‘Look, why did you do this? As a result of what you did, when I go home, my constituents are yelling at me that I’ve got to stand on principle.’ … There are a lot of people that don’t like to be held accountable. … They said: ‘Listen, before you did this, the politics of it were great. The Dems were the bad guys. The Republicans were the good guys. Now we all look like a bunch of squishes.’ Well there is an alternative. You could just not be a bunch of squishes.” —April 26, 2013 On whether Mitch McConnell should continue to be Senate Minority Leader: “That is ultimately a decision … for the voters of Kentucky to make. … Each senator, each representative makes a decision about how he or she will vote, and when those votes are clear to their constituents, democracy works far better.” —Feb. 12, 2014 On colleagues who didn’t join his filibuster of Obamacare: “Senators should not be asleep when the nation is undergoing a nightmare.” —Sept. 24, 2013 On the Republican plan to defund Obamacare: “My observations right now that there are some Republicans that would like a symbolic vote and would like to lose so that they don’t have any risk of it actually being defunded, I promise you those comments are not getting me invited to any cocktail parties in Washington anytime soon. And that’s perfectly fine. I don’t particularly enjoy cocktail parties anyway.” —Sept. 24, 2013

It was a contentious, divisive, even obnoxious thing for Cruz to do, and it didn’t make any sense, which is perhaps the most confounding thing about Ted Cruz: He’s clearly smart, and he thinks a lot about strategy. He has no known demons that would drive him to self-sabotage. Yet since being sworn in last year, he has fallen on his sword several times for highly dubious reasons.

So, why do it?

I keep coming back to my conversations with him last fall. Although he hadn’t had much appetite for small talk, he always perked up when my questions turned to fiscal matters and budget cutting—and the subject of whether his fellow Republicans really got it.

One particular exchange seemed telling: When we met in his Hill office last October, he was giving an impassioned take on his plans for fiscal discipline when he mentioned the need for entitlement reform, saying that he wanted to ensure the viability of Social Security and Medicare over the long term, rather than whittling away at them.

“Why do you think President Bush’s effort to reform Social Security got so little traction?” I asked.

“Because Congressional Republicans ran for the hills,” Cruz said. “It was one of the most courageous things President Bush did in his second term, was taking on Social Security. He was right to do it, and unfortunately, on Capitol Hill he had virtually no allies.”

“Why did they run for the hills?”

“Because the dominant instinct in Congress is risk aversion,” he said.

His attitude was placid, as if he were again observing that Zorro and the Phantom wear similar masks, as if he either didn’t realize or didn’t care that this was a pretty cutting thing to say, that it was exactly the kind of comment that might irritate his colleagues.

Cruz was, at that point, aware of the criticisms that had been directed at him during the effort to defund Obamacare, and defiant about them: Although he acknowledged that the defunding strategy wasn’t likely to succeed, he insisted that it had a chance to do so—and that other Republicans hadn’t offered a better strategy for stopping the law before it took effect, on Oct. 1 of last year.

But even prior to the defunding campaign, he had been casually critical of his party on many occasions. During that first interview, in July, he went out of his way to tweak fellow Republicans. “For a long time, the federal government, I believe, has spent too much, taxed too much, regulated too much and borrowed too much,” he said. “And that has been a bipartisan affliction—an awful lot of Republicans were complicit in exploding the size, power and spending of the federal government.” As political rhetoric goes, it was benign enough. It certainly wasn’t as aggressive as when he implied, in July, as he was starting to talk about the defunding strategy, that moderate Republicans in the Senate can be summarized as a “surrender caucus,” for example.

But Cruz has a pattern of making such comments, and of acting on them, as he did last week. Both his debt-ceiling gambit and the defunding campaign were practically guaranteed to fail, and to annoy his colleagues in the process. And that being the case, for Cruz’s many critics, last week’s stunt probably seemed like pointless, annoying grandstanding—and odd, given that Cruz could use some allies in Congress if he has any aspirations for higher office, which he presumably does. (Cruz, who is 43, said several things during our interviews that gave me the impression he has already considered how he might justify running for president at such a relatively young age and with less than a full term under his belt—that the country doesn’t have forever to address its fiscal and economic issues, and so on. And although some of Cruz’s more ardent supporters have harrumphed that he should abandon the surrender caucus and lead a new party, I found no indication that he wants to leave the Republican fold. “I am not a fan of third parties,” he told me, when I pressed him on that question.)

There was, however, one difference between the defund-Obamacare campaign and the debt- ceiling stunt—and it’s a difference that may illuminate a politician who can seem inexplicable. With regard to the defunding campaign, Cruz had insisted to me on several occasions that there was a plausible, if unlikely, objective: that if Senate Republicans stood together, a handful of Democrats—red-state Democrats facing reelection in 2014, to start—might be moved to join them. Last week, though, there wasn’t even a theoretical policy goal.

Senate Democrats had enough votes to pass the measure raising the debt ceiling. Before the Senate could vote, though, its Democratic leaders needed 60 senators to vote in favor of cloture. In theory, if all 45 Senate Republicans voted against cloture, they could have delayed passage of the bill itself by filibustering. Cruz’s reasoning, then, was that Senate Republicans who voted for cloture were effectively endorsing the Democrats’ goal of raising the debt ceiling, even if they subsequently cast what he later dismissed as a “show vote” against the bill itself. Cruz described this as a question of “truth and transparency”: If his colleagues were going to tell voters that they were against raising the debt ceiling, they should prove it. In other words, in last week’s attempt to derail the debt ceiling bill, it sure sounded like Cruz’s primary goal was for the conciliators to declare themselves. It was a dare.

Just the kind of dare that Cruz himself is likely to take. The senator is blasé about personal risk—and, perhaps correspondingly, not very patient with politicians who aren’t. “If you never lose any fight, then you’re not taking on anything of consequence or anything difficult,” he told me on the day when we last spoke in Washington, adding that he was “not at all” afraid of losing fights. Every politician says things like that. Cruz, however, has a record of meaning it: He began his career in electoral politics in 2012 by launching a quixotic campaign for Texas’s Republican Senate nomination against an incumbent statewide officeholder, lieutenant governor David Dewhurst, who is ludicrously wealthy and was supported by most of the key members of the state’s political establishment. It was genuinely risky. It wasn’t the kind of bet most successful, pedigreed, politically minded lawyers would make.

***

During one of our conversations last year, I asked Cruz about his favorite movies, and in addition to a couple of classics—The Godfather, The Princess Bride—he mentioned Amazing Grace, a 2010 drama about the effort to end the British slave trade that’s become popular in Tea Party circles.

“The abolition movie?” I asked.

“Yes, about William Wilberforce,” Cruz said. “It’s an incredible story about a member of Parliament who fought for his principles, and when he began, he was almost entirely alone. And conventional wisdom in the British Parliament was there was no way to stop the British slave trade. And Wilberforce endured enormous criticism and animosity and yet, over the decades, stood resolutely for principle and transformed not only Britain but the world, by succeeding at long last in abolishing the unspeakable evil that was the British slave trade.”

“So, why do you like it so much?” I asked. I’d been following him around for more than three hours by this point, pelting him with sometimes frivolous questions, and I wouldn’t have resented a flash of annoyance at what was obviously a trolling follow up. But Cruz remained placid.

“It is inspirational in every sense,” he said, evenly.

Cruz is perfectly capable of being polite, in other words. The fact that he sometimes chooses not to be made me suspect that his tendency to flout his senior colleagues in the Senate isn’t simply Tea Party umbrage about politics as usual. Of course, political calculations may well have something to do with it; Congress does have a 13 percent approval rating. But it’s hard to see a strategy behind something like last week’s dustup. Instead, it seems to point to a real idiosyncrasy that this otherwise disciplined operator can’t or won’t bother to conceal: a suspicion of authority, a distaste for being scolded about etiquette or a sincere disdain for politicians who strike him as craven or chicken.

At the same time, Cruz was more ecumenical than one might think, given the Tea Party’s usual preoccupation with purity tests. During our interviews, I told him a number of times that I disagreed with him about various things—food stamps, defense spending, Obamacare’s effect on jobs and so on. He always pushed back, but agreeably enough—it was sparring, not condescension.

Cruz also has a capacity to think through different perspectives. In college, he told me, he supported legalizing drugs, particularly marijuana, for two reasons: personal freedom and the apparent intractability of the international drug trade. By the end of college, though, he came to oppose legalization again. He had concluded, he said, that legalizing drugs would encourage their use by lessening the social stigma, and that the evidence didn’t support the argument that legalization would end the violence and criminality of the transnational cartels. “The more I looked at the issue, the less I was persuaded of that benefit,” he recalled.

Similarly, he explained that he was initially undecided about Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s proposal to address sexual assault in the military by taking the decision-making authority for such prosecutions out of the chain of command, but he had been persuaded by the evidence presented during the course of the hearings and decided to support Gillibrand’s bill. (He was bemused at the fact that his support for the bill had surprised some observers and asked one of his staffers to forward me a particularly incredulous article that had appeared in a New York paper in response.)

In other words, there’s a converse to Cruz’s frustration with those Republicans he sees as trying to have it both ways: He’s temperate enough when people openly disagree. Sometimes he even listens. And that, I think, suggests a path forward for Cruz’s antagonists, both within and outside the Republican Party, which is that those who want to fight him should just go ahead and do so rather than engaging in the Senate’s favored passive-aggressive dance.

Several colleagues have already taken that route, with good results. Oklahoma Republican Tom Coburn, for example, was the most effective critic of the attempt to defund Obamacare last year. He didn't bother wringing his hands over Cruz's behavior. He simply observed that the strategy was doomed to fail: Even if the Senate passed a budget defunding the law, the president would presumably veto it. And Coburn, in contrast to Arizona’s John McCain (who famously dismissed Cruz and several other Tea Party-type congressmen as “wacko birds”) apparently remains on good terms with the unruly freshman.

For that matter, John Cornyn, the senior senator from Texas, had a perfectly reasonable response to Cruz's recent purity test. He declined to play ball—he was one of the Republicans who voted for cloture, then voted against raising the debt ceiling—and he explained why: “All Republicans opposed raising the debt ceiling, and that was the main event. I think everything else was sort of window dressing.”

Cruz will, no doubt, win some fights in his political career. He will also lose some, as he did often last year. He is, after all, a junior member of the Senate’s minority party. And maybe he has won something big already: If senior Republicans won’t stand up to him when they disagree with him, doesn’t that say as much about them as it does about him?