On a sweltering midsummer evening in 2013 in America’s swampy capital, a who’s who of other right-wing stars and influential superactivists was quietly crowding into a cramped conference room in Mike Lee’s Senate office. Inside, lawmakers including Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, Jeff Flake, and Pat Toomey stood shoulder to shoulder with senior officials from cash-flush grassroots groups like Freedom-Works and Tea Party Patriots. The off-the-record meeting had been given an after-hours start time so as not to arouse suspicion from unfriendly colleagues, and attendees were told that the gathering was to remain strictly hush-hush. Vast right-wing conspiracies, after all, required the utmost discretion.
The act of rebellion being plotted tonight was an audacious, last-ditch plan to cripple Obamacare before the law went into full effect and became impossible to untangle from the rest of America’s social safety net. Defeating the president’s legacy-making health-care law had long been an Ahab-like obsession for many Republicans, and it was easy to see why. The law’s application was mired in the morass of feckless federal bureaucracy. The parts that did go into effect were a source of consternation for small business owners, many of whom complained that new regulations on employee health insurance plans were forcing layoffs and stunting growth. Polls at the time showed that Obamacare had grown increasingly unpopular almost from the day the White House had jammed it through Congress on a party line vote. And opposition to the law was one of the rare stances that could unite every faction of the GOP. The Affordable Care Act’s popular nickname probably played a role, too. As one former political adviser for Cruz told me, “I think there’s something about it being called ‘Obamacare’ that just makes us go crazy, like if we can’t get rid of him, we’re going to get rid of his law.”
But so far, the conservative quest to gut the health-care law had been one long train of failures and disappointments. In 2012, a promising Supreme Court challenge to the law ended in a heartbreaking betrayal, when Chief Justice John Roberts, a Bush-appointed conservative, cast the deciding vote to uphold Obamacare’s individual mandate. The Republican-controlled House, meanwhile, had passed dozens of bills repealing the law, but with Democrats still holding on to the Senate, there was a better chance of Harry Reid leading a ritual animal sacrifice on the steps of the Capitol than allowing a vote on the legislation.
Now, however, a perfect storm of legislative crises was on the horizon—and the conservatives gathered in Lee’s office were determined to take advantage.
On October 1, the federal government would run out of money and be forced to shut down unless Republicans helped Congress pass a temporary funding bill. About three weeks after that, the United States would begin defaulting on its loans—thus setting off an unprecedented global economic panic—unless Republicans helped Congress vote to raise the debt ceiling. And, as always, the Republicans on the Hill were happy to do their part to steer clear of the apocalypse—for a price.
This had been the modus operandi of Washington’s right wing ever since the 2010 wave election sent a militia of Tea Party freshmen storming into the Capitol—and up to that point the high-stakes negotiating tactic had largely worked. Already, conservatives were abuzz about what they would get out of this next round of legislative brinksmanship. Some had suggested demanding the repeal of the unpopular tax on medical devices. Others had raised the idea of delaying the individual mandate.
But Mike Needham, the spiky-haired, thirty-one-year-old CEO of the Tea Party–aligned pressure group Heritage Action, was thinking on a grander scale. Four years ago, in an apparent spasm of Wile E. Coyote envy, Needham had begun drawing up a hypothetical strategy that would leverage the threat of a government shutdown to achieve the wholesale defunding of the president’s health-care law. Not chip away at it, or tinker with it, or repeal some fractional piece of it—no, Needham’s plan was to bust open Obamacare’s federal piggy bank and loot it of every last taxpayer penny, effectively killing the law.
To lead the charge on the Hill, Needham had tapped Lee—a solid, policy-minded conservative with Tea Party roots and a devoted fan base of think tank wonks.
Sitting tonight at the head of the table in a room overflowing with battle-ready allies, the doughy, mild-mannered Utah senator did his best to lay out Heritage’s pugnacious plan with flare. Their strategy, he explained, was designed to harness the public outrage that would inevitably accompany a shutdown, and then channel it toward Democrats—eventually piling on so much pressure that they would have no choice but to cave on Obamacare.
As he sat listening to Lee outline the details of the defund plan, Cruz wasn’t quite as filled with the same enthusiasm that some of his fellow right-wing conspirators seemed to evince. It wasn’t that he harbored any reluctance about annihilating Obamacare by whatever means necessary—that was a no-brainer. But the thing that Cruz found appealing about the defund plan was its potential for high drama: a shutdown fight was exactly the kind of platform he had been looking for ever since Rand’s star-making filibuster a few months ago. The voters who had sent him to Washington wanted results, yes—but absent that, they at least wanted to be able to cheer on him and his fellow Tea Partiers as they slugged it out in exhilarating, high-profile brawls on the national stage. And here, it seemed, they might have a problem.
Cruz knew that for this defund plan to take off the way they wanted it to in the fall, their cross-country tour hyping the thing would have to be the political spectacle of the summer. The rallies they held would have to be barn burners that conservative activists everywhere would line up around the block to see in person, like Michael Jordan in his prime. But for all of Mike Lee’s many gifts, political theater was not among them. Just that day, Lee had delivered a six-minute speech on the Senate floor designed to build buzz for the coming showdown, but it had been a total dud. For all his policy savvy, Lee lacked gravitas. When he spoke in public, he had a habit of placing his hands just in front of his stomach, and gently pressing his fingertips together in a pose that was reminiscent of a choirboy—or, more fittingly, given his delivery, a mortician. His speech had gone entirely unnoticed—hardly an auspicious beginning to a campaign that was supposed to mark the permanent emergence of the Tea Party in Washington. For this to work, it would have to be much more exciting. It would need to be an event, a performance.
Enter Ted Cruz, stage Right.
The bedtime stories Ted Cruz grew up listening to were not the kind with magic beanstalks and fairy godmothers. In his house, story time meant daddy time—and Ted’s father never had much interest in gently reciting soporific fairy tales to a tucked-in cherub. A Cuban exile with ironclad ideals and a fighting spirit, Rafael Cruz was drawn to stories with high stakes and lofty themes. At night, when he came home from work, he would swing his son onto his knee and regale him with glorious, true-life tales of tribulation and triumph—epics in which evil clashed with good, and great men met their destinies.
Sometimes these stories would come from Rafael’s own days as a young Cuban revolutionary—harrowing yarns studded with gritty details that would stay with Ted forever. The image of bloodstained teeth dangling from Rafael’s mouth after three days of torture in an army garrison. The realization that if he didn’t flee the country he would risk death at the hands of the ruthless Batista regime. The acceptance letter to the University of Texas, the ferry ride to Key West that felt like liberation, the bumpy two-day bus trip to Austin. And, most memorable of all, the secret pocket sewn into his underwear that carried a hundred dollars in cash—all the money he’d brought to America.
Other times, Rafael’s stories would come from the Bible. Together, father and son would sit in their modestly furnished living room as the elder Cruz read to the younger about prophets and kings—about the walls of Jericho crumbling, and the Philistine giant falling, and the Red Sea parting. Stories of persecution endured and miracles performed—and of God’s chosen leaders raining down fire and frogs and locusts and lice to deliver the oppressed millions from a power-mad Pharaoh.
But of all the stories Cruz grew up with, there was one that his father told him more often and more urgently than any other. He was just four years old when he heard it for the first time. They were at home, and Rafael had been reading to his son from the Old Testament when suddenly the Cruz family patriarch felt moved by the spirit to prophesy.
“Ted,” he proclaimed, each vowel stretched by his Cuban accent, each word punctuated by conviction, “you have been gifted above any man that I know, and God has destined you for greatness.”
It was a prophecy that Rafael would go on to repeat—often word for word—every single day until Cruz moved out of the house.
Decades later, an aide and confidant who had worked closely with Cruz for years would point to that moment as singularly formative: “Everything else in Ted’s life is explained by his dad saying that.”
When Cruz was thirteen his father brought him to Rolland Storey, a kindly and charismatic septuagenarian who ran a conservative foundation aimed at teaching youth about economics and government. Storey educated his pupils about the brightest minds of free market economics: they pored over Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman, and marveled at Frédéric Bastiat’s denunciations of socialism as legal plunder. A veteran of vaudeville, Storey liked to re-create constitutional conventions and assign students to play delegates in mock debates. Many of his students were gifted, but none could keep up with Cruz in terms of passion and inherent ability. Thrust into some of the momentous scenes from world history, the thirteen-year-old was perfectly at home.
Eventually, Storey invited Cruz to join a traveling troupe of patriotic performers that he called the Constitutional Corroborators. The five students would meet twice a week to study and memorize the Constitution with the help of a mnemonic specialist, and then they took their show on the road, wowing Rotary Clubs and veterans’ groups with their mastery of the document: they wrote out entire sections on easels and then answered questions from the delighted crowds. At home, Cruz would practice these performances late into the night, studying himself in the mirror as he perfected each tic and quirk of his delivery.
By the time he got to high school, Cruz was fully accustomed to the adults in his life telling him he was special. But at his small Baptist school, “special” turned out to be alienating, and few of his forty-three classmates bothered to befriend him. “To be perfectly honest, because he was so unusually brilliant, he was a little different,” recalled one fellow student. “He was kind of a quirky high school kid.” Cruz told himself that the kids who excluded and poked fun at him were jealous, or intimidated, or too slow to keep up with his wit and match his interests. And maybe all that was true.
But he could also be condescending and abrasive—a fact he would acknowledge later in life with one of his aides, in a rare instance of self-reflection. “I think he’s deeply okay with it,” the aide told me. “He knows who he is, more than I think people realize. He understands people don’t like him… We all tell ourselves positive reasons people don’t like us. His was that he’s special and they’re not.”
It was late in August 2013, and Ted Cruz was standing on a platform at the far end of a cavernous Hilton Anatole ballroom. “Having spent a little bit of time in Washington, DC,” the senator shouted, “it’s great to be back in America!” Thousands of restless, well-dressed patriots were sitting in front of him here in Dallas America; a huge blue, rectangular “Defund Obamacare” banner was hanging behind him. The sleeves of his white button-down shirt were cuffed with a precise sort of sloppiness just above his wrists, and a healthy heaping of pomade gave his sharply parted black hair a soft luster under the stage lights.
The production was part of the nine-city tour organized by Heritage Action to gin up grassroots support for its new plan to gut Obamacare, and a brigade of right-wing ruckus raisers had fanned out across the country to make their case during Congress’s August recess.
But none of the other spokesmen for the cause were getting the kind of reception that Cruz would get here. Here he was a star. A hero. An icon. An oratorical wizard-warrior who could take any old cluster of words and transform them into a riotous applause line, simply by pausing a beat after the period.
This linguistic alchemy was on full display almost from the moment Cruz began speaking.
“I have publicly committed, along with a number of other senators, that under no circumstances will I vote for a continuing resolution that funds even one penny of Obamacare!” he declared.
The patriots rose in unison, cheering wildly as Cruz planted his feet and nodded his head in the purposeful, macho manner of a pro wrestler. When the room quieted, he surged forward, urging the patriots to ignore the naysayers and the pearl-clutchers who said his strategy would never work.
“Now, why is it that every reporter in the media, and a significant percentage of Republicans, assume with an impasse that President Obama will never, ever, ever give up his principles, so Republicans have to give up theirs?”
More applause, as excitement pulsed through the crowd. Cruz’s voice grew louder, his hands, up near his face, formed as though they were clutching an invisible set of stone tablets.
“If you have an impasse… one side or the other has to blink,” he said. “How do we win this fight?”
Shouting now and smashing the tablets on the ground:
“Don’t blink!”
The patriots rose again, and this time they meant it, whistling and whooping and splashing around in the free-flowing catharsis that the senator had unleashed on the ballroom. And Cruz, caught up in the moment, clapped, too. Because after all, this wasn’t about any one senator. It was about the movement. The voters. The “we the people.” It was about America.
And here in America, they loved him.
Two weeks later, lawmakers returned from their summer vacations to find a Washington awash in defund fever. The crackpot plan floated by Mike Lee a couple of months ago—and ignored by most everyone—was suddenly a full-blown movement thanks to Ted Cruz, complete with hashtags and Hannity rants and a website, enthusiastically touted by the Texas senator and his cohorts, that listed each congressional Republican’s stated position on the strategy, and encouraged constituents to call up the ones who were on the “wrong” side of the issue. Right-wing activists were now lighting up Capitol Hill phone lines, and a growing number of House Republicans—some of them genuinely converted, others simply petrified—were lining up behind Cruz, pledging that they would not vote for a bill to fund the government as long as it meant allocating money to Obamacare.
With the prospect of a government shutdown looming over them, Republican leaders in Congress—including Speaker John Boehner, Majority Leader Eric Cantor, and the rest of the GOP babysitters tasked with keeping these Tea Party temper tantrums under control—were frantically searching for a fix. In the past, when flare-ups like this had threatened to derail the basic mechanics of government, the leadership would work out a face-saving compromise of some sort. They’d set up symbolic votes that right-wing lawmakers could take to shield themselves from the wrath of Rush Limbaugh, and then—when necessary—they’d quietly nudge those same members to take the necessary-evil votes in order to keep Washington functioning. This was why, since 2010, the Republican-controlled House had voted more than fifty times to repeal, defund, dismantle, or otherwise destroy Obamacare—even when they knew it would have no practical effect. It may not have been what Madison and Jefferson had in mind, and no one in leadership was particularly proud of the routine, but at least it had kept the lights on through the early days of the Tea Party era.
With this in mind, Cantor dispatched a top staffer, Neil Bradley, to the weekly staff meeting for the Republican Study Committee caucus on Monday afternoon to strategize with the hundred-plus conservative congressional aides in attendance. Bradley’s mission was to help figure out a way to sate the right wing’s appetite for red meat without shish-kebabing the entire party. To do this, Bradley tried to paint a scary picture of the cataclysmic repercussions that could result if a shutdown occurred.
Perhaps the most dire outcome, Bradley told the group, is that our soldiers won’t receive their paychecks.
This assertion prompted one of Cruz’s lieutenants in the room—an aide named Max Pappas—to stand in objection.
That’s not true, Pappas argued. You know as well as I do that if the government shuts down, Congress can simply pass a stopgap bill that pays the troops until it’s over. All this destitute-soldier tripe is nothing more than petty scare tactics and typical excuse making from the yellow-bellied establishment.
Pappas might have continued reciting his Cruz-crafted talking points—but all of a sudden, another Republican aide in the room sprang to her feet and cut him off. She introduced herself as a staffer in Texas representative John Culberson’s office, and then—without warning—launched into an unbridled tirade against Cruz and his allies. She pilloried the Texas senator for bringing his Shutdown-palooza road show into her boss’s district—whipping up local conservatives into a delusional, cultlike hysteria and demonizing any Republican officeholder who was disinclined to guzzle his cyanide-spiked Kool-Aid.
Why, she demanded to know, was Cruz doing this? Why was he insisting on making everyone else’s life so difficult?
It was a remarkable moment for such a typically staid staff meeting, and soon rumors of the confrontation would hit the Internet, forcing Representative Culberson to release a statement distancing himself from the comments.
But in that instance—as the exasperated Republican staffer let loose a torrent of scorn on Cruz and his narcissistic, nihilistic brand of politics—she wasn’t just speaking for her backbencher boss. She was giving voice to the Capitol Hill in crowd’s fast-hardening disdain for the self-obsessed freshman who refused to fit in.
“You are not dealing in reality!” she huffed to Cruz’s aide, drawing supportive applause from dozens of Republican aides in the room.
And yet reality was an increasingly fluid thing in Washington. The customary decorum and established procedures that once made up the very atomic matter of the Senate had been rapidly dissipating ever since the Tea Party came to town, and the result was a dark and growing void where the laws of the universe no longer applied. As far as Cruz was concerned, these frightened politicos could scurry around trying to reverse the galactic tide all they wanted, but it was never going to work.
He was here now. He’d arrived. This was the big bang.
On September 20, 2013, Cruz notched his first big win since arriving in Washington when the House of Representatives heeded his clarion call and voted 230 to 189 to keep the government open through December 15 on the sole condition that Obamacare’s budget was looted of every last dime.
The victory would be short-lived. The House bill was now headed to the Democrat-controlled Senate, where Majority Leader Harry Reid had already declared it would be dead on arrival. Even if the bill did somehow make it to the president’s desk, Obama had already pledged to break out his veto stamp.
Meanwhile, hordes of GOP opinion makers were stampeding toward the nearest cameras and keyboards to pile on Cruz and what they called the “Kamikaze Caucus.” In the Washington Post, conservative commentator Jennifer Rubin eviscerated Cruz and Lee, charging that they were “intent on running into a concrete wall again and again to prove their political machismo.”
And on Fox News Sunday, Karl Rove took the Tea Partiers to task for flouting even the most basic expectations of partisan courtesy. “You cannot build a congressional majority, in either party, for any kind of action, unless you are treating your colleagues with some certain amount of respect and saying, ‘Hey, what do you think of my idea?’” Rove said. “Instead, they have dictated to their colleagues.”
While the entire political world coalesced around the conventional wisdom that the defund gambit was a bust, the Texas senator was busy beating the war drum as furiously as ever.
Hold the line!
Don’t retreat!
Victory is at hand!
“Republicans have the momentum,” Cruz declared three days after the House vote. “All we have to do is have the will to fight.”
The senator had the uncanny message discipline of a North Korean propagandist—and his performance was increasingly perplexing to the politicos of the Washington establishment. Cruz was still new to Washington, and many of them had assumed this whole time that he was playing some sort of Machiavellian game with a built-in exit strategy. But now the federal government was days away from running out of money, and there was no sign of an endgame in sight. As this new reality dawned on Washington, some in the political world began to wonder if they had been wrong about Cruz. Could it be possible that he really was the wild-eyed true believer he played at Tea Party rallies? Did he actually believe—against all evidence to the contrary—that this cockamamie scheme could work?
And if so, how far was he willing to take it?