It’s hard for Ted Cruz to be humble. Part of the challenge stems from his résumé, which the Texas senator wears like a sandwich board. There’s the Princeton class ring that’s always on his right hand and the crimson gown that, as a graduate of Harvard Law School, he donned when called upon to give a commencement speech earlier this year. (Cruz’s fellow Harvard Law alums Barack Obama and Mitt Romney typically perform their graduation duties in whatever robes they’re given.) Even Cruz’s favorite footwear, a pair of black ostrich-skin cowboy boots, serves as an advertisement for his credentials and connections. "These are my argument boots," he told me one morning this summer as we rode the subway car beneath the Capitol to a vote on the Senate floor. "When I was Texas solicitor general, I did every argument in these boots. The one court that I was not willing to wear them in was the U.S. Supreme Court, and it was because my former boss and dear friend William Rehnquist was still chief justice. He and I were very close—he was a wonderful man—but he was very much a stickler for attire."

It was only after Rehnquist died that Cruz felt comfortable wearing his cowboy boots in the Supreme Court—and only then because John Roberts ("a friend for many years") blessed it. "I saw John shortly after his confirmation," Cruz said, "and I guess I was feeling a little cheeky, because I took the opportunity to ask, ’Mr. Chief Justice, do you have any views on the appropriateness of boots as footwear at oral argument?’ And Chief Justice Roberts chuckled and he said, ’You know, Ted, if you’re representing the state of Texas, they’re not only appropriate, they’re required.’ "

Cruz, 42, arrived in Washington in January as the ultimate conservative purist, a hero to both salt-of-the-earth Tea Partiers and clubby GOP think-tankers, and since then he has come to the reluctant but unavoidable conclusion that he is simply more intelligent, more principled, more right—in both senses of the word—than pretty much everyone else in our nation’s capital. That alone isn’t so outrageous for the Senate. "Every one of these guys thinks he’s the smartest guy in the room," one senior Democratic aide told me. "But Cruz is utterly incapable of cloaking it in any kind of collegiality. He’s just so brazen."

Little more than a month after Cruz was sworn in, Senator Barbara Bo, a Democrat from California, likened him to Joe McCarthy for his conduct during Chuck Hagel’s confirmation for secretary of defense. Without presenting a shred of evidence, Cruz insinuated that Hagel, a fellow Republican, was on the take from America’s enemies. Because Hagel had declined to reveal the source of a $200,000 payment, Cruz suggested, how do we know it didn’t come from the North Korean government? Or Saudi Arabia’s? Even South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham, also a Republican, called Cruz’s line of inquiry "out of bounds."

And then there was the moment, just a month later, when the Judiciary Committee was debating the assault--weapons ban: Cruz was trying to get it through Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein’s thick skull that there was this thing called the Second Amendment and that it deserved the same respect as the rest of the Bill of Rights. He made his point by rattling off other amendments and the rights they protected until Feinstein bristled, "I’m not a sixth grader. I’ve been on this committee for twenty years.... I’ve studied the Constitution myself. I am reasonably well educated, and I thank you for the lecture."

For a while, veteran Republicans groused in private about the new guy. But it boiled over when Cruz joined Kentucky senator Rand Paul’s filibuster of John Brennan’s nomination to head the CIA—an act of protest against Obama’s drone program. John McCain, already seething over Cruz’s treatment of Hagel, called them "wacko birds." "He fucking hates Cruz," one adviser of the Arizona senator told me. "He’s just offended by his style."

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The "wacko bird" dig, however, has only endeared Cruz more to his party’s purist wing. Already his fans are nudging him to think about a presidential run in 2016, and he’s nudging right back, making trips to Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. He’s even embraced "wacko bird," reclaiming McCain’s knock as a badge of honor. Later on the day I visited him on Capitol Hill, Cruz was engaging in the kind of showing off that even his detractors might forgive: He was giving me a tour of his Senate office. "A couple of things I keep," he said, picking up a red leather rectangle branded with the words IT CAN BE DONE—a replica, he explained, of the sign that sat on President Reagan’s desk in the Oval Office. The tchotchke he was most excited to show me, however, was a black baseball cap with a picture of Daffy Duck next to the words WACKO BIRD. Supporters back in Texas made it, Cruz said, grabbing the hat from its prominent perch on his bookshelf. "Isn’t it great?"

But all along, what kept drawing my eye was a giant oil painting above the couch depicting Cruz as he delivered the first of his nine oral arguments before the Supreme Court. "I was 32 years old," he recalled. "It was abundantly clear we didn’t have a prayer.... And I’ve always enjoyed the fact that as I’m sitting at my desk, I’m looking at a giant painting of me getting my rear end whipped 9-0." He gazed at the wall. It is an unusual painting: From the artist’s vantage point, we see three other courtroom artists, each also drawing Cruz—so the painting actually features not one but four images of young Cruz before the bench. "It is helpful," he explained to me, "for keeping one grounded."

Ted Cruz doesn’t look much like a wacko bird. With his pomaded black hair and trim suits—the kind you might expect on a former partner at an international law firm, say, or the husband of a Goldman Sachs executive—the more appropriate avian metaphor would seem to be a peacock. He doesn’t sound much like a wacko bird, either. Cruz is a dazzling orator, speaking not merely in precise sentences but complete paragraphs—no teleprompter, sometimes not even a podium—and name-dropping everyone from Reagan to Rawls (as in John, the late Harvard philosopher).

But as Cruz and his supporters define it, "wacko bird" describes more of a state of mind. Or as Cruz put it on the Senate floor a few weeks before my visit, in the midst of yet another fight with McCain, this time over the rules for negotiating a budget: "It has been suggested that those of us who are fighting to defend liberty—fighting to turn around the out-of-control spending and out-of-control debt in this country, fighting to defend the Constitution, it has been suggested that we are wacko birds. Well, if that is the case, I will suggest to my friend from Arizona, there may be more wacko birds in the Senate than is suspected."

He might be right. This certainly feels like a wacko-bird moment in Washington, and maybe in America, too. It’s a time when governmental breakdown and public antipathy for the profession of politics have combined to create a perverse incentive structure for congressional Republicans—one that punishes politeness and cooperation and rewards antagonism and obstruction. So far Cruz has proposed no major legislation and has shown little interest in changing that. He seems content accomplishing nothing because, in Cruz’s view of the federal government, nothing is the accomplishment.