Senators John McCain and Ted Cruz don’t exactly have the best relationship. Cruz has said Republicans like McCain are why their party doesn’t do better, and McCain has not been shy about publicly dumping on Cruz, especially during last year’s government shutdown.

And in a new interview with Salon today, McCain wanted to make it clear that the incoming crop of Republicans that will give their party control of the Senate will not be Cruzes. McCain even claimed that a lot of the GOP Senate candidates who won are in the same mold as himself and Lindsey Graham.

Salon’s Elias Isquith asked McCain about the “Ted Cruz’s Senate” narrative for the upcoming GOP majority. And McCain argued that couldn’t be further from the truth:

I was very pleased when one of the first things Mitch McConnell said yesterday was, “We’re not going to shut down the government again.” I think that you just saw a McCain-Graham injection into the United State Senate — Joni Ernst, comes from the military; Tom Cotton, comes from the military; Dan Sullivan, comes from the military … I’ve campaigned for literally every one of them and I have not seen any indication that they are of that desire for confrontation. And I was with most of them when they campaigned and said, “I’ll go to Washington and get things done.”

It’s worth noting that Cruz endorsed Joni Ernst in her race and praised her as a strong conservative, and that last year Tom Cotton had some worse of praise for Cruz and said the Senate needs more like him.

[images via Christopher Halloran/Shutterstock]

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Follow Josh Feldman on Twitter: @feldmaniac

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