In this brave new world, it's not just the Enormously Consensual President who feels empowered to say anything at all on national television. The shamelessness has filtered down, particularly to those who had a taste for it to begin with. Enter Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, who spent his last cent of shame calling voters on behalf of a candidate who publicly insulted his wife's appearance and insinuated his father was involved in the JFK assassination. Now Cruz is freed up to really let it rip, and he did just that on MSNBC Monday:

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This whole exchange is, as his questioner—NBC's Kacie Hunt—made clear, ridiculous. (His plug for his book, A Time for Truth, is merely the icing.) In 2013, Cruz led the charge, particularly among the more extreme House Republicans, to oppose any government funding bill that did not defund Obamacare. Obviously, President Obama and Senate Democrats—who still controlled the higher chamber—rejected the idea that their signature legislative achievement of the decade should be de facto repealed through parliamentary trickery and hostage-taking. Cruz capped off his performative opposition to funding a duly enacted piece of federal legislation by reading Dr. Seuss' Green Eggs and Ham on the floor of the Senate as part of a 21-hour protest speech:

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Cruz's conductorial role was so clear that his Republican colleagues largely blamed him for the whole mess, as a Politico write-up from October 2013 makes clear:



Ted Cruz faced a barrage of hostile questions Wednesday from angry GOP senators, who lashed the Texas tea party freshman for helping prompt a government shutdown crisis without a strategy to end it...

“It was very evident to everyone in the room that Cruz doesn’t have a strategy – he never had a strategy, and could never answer a question about what the end-game was,” said one senator who attended the meeting. “I just wish the 35 House members that have bought the snake oil that was sold could witness what was witnessed today at lunch.” ...

Many Senate Republicans publicly and privately scoffed at the Cruz tactics, arguing that he was making a false and politically damaging promise that he could use the funding bill to gut Obamacare — since the law moved forward anyway on Tuesday despite the government shutdown.

Cruz's shtick this time around only makes sense if you consider the vote in a complete vacuum where all that matters is whether you voted "yes" or "no." The reason there was even a prospect of a shutdown was because of the intra-Republican insurgency Cruz spearheaded in the House. He did more than any other member of Congress to create the conditions for a shutdown. Even the Wall Street Journal editorial board, a reliable GOP backer which recently told Special Counsel Robert Mueller to shove off, characterized the 2013 shutdown thusly in an editorial from this past weekend:

The government shutdown continued on Sunday as Senate Democrats imitate Republican Ted Cruz’s 2013 strategy of using government funding to force a President’s hand on an unrelated issue. Mr. Cruz wanted ObamaCare repeal while Democrats want to coerce the GOP on immigration, but the budget blackmail strategy deserves to fail again.

"Budget blackmail?" Sounds a lot like the "legislative arson" about which Speaker Paul Ryan was complaining a few days back. The kind of power politics in which the Democrats just dabbled was unquestionably introduced into the modern body politic by the Republican Party, beginning with the scorched-earth tactics of Newt Gingrich in the '90s and culminating with the various spasms of the Tea Party—of which Cruz's 2013 number was the coup de grace. That does not justify the Democrats' strategy as a matter of principle. But it does justify ridiculing Ted Cruz.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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