Facing a tight re-election race, hardline Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) is now claiming that he’s a bipartisan champion of reaching across the aisle.
“What is new is not that I’m passing bipartisan legislation that helps produce jobs in Texas,” Cruz—one of Congress’ most resolutely partisan members, so much so that many of his own colleagues reportedly hate him—said in an interview with Politico. “I’ve been doing that since the day I arrived in the Senate. What is new is we’re finally getting the press to report on it.”
The story, published Monday, noted Cruz’s bipartisan achievements—“new, trade-promoting bridges across the Rio Grande; tax relief for hurricane victims; and the most recent FAA Reauthorization Act”—but then also flagged his opposition to major across-the-aisle initiatives like the CHIPS and Science Act and the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act. His Texas colleague in the Senate, John Cornyn, supported both.
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Cruz was also viscerally opposed to the bipartisan border bill that failed in May, alleging that “the Democrats deliberately want this border crisis to continue.”
An index of Senate bipartisanship by the Lugar Center and Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy—measuring how much a legislator co-sponsors bills introduced by the opposite party and how much their bills attract sponsorship from the opposite party—ranked Cruz 89th out of 98 senators.
In other words, the man who routinely lambastes Democrats as trying to destroy America, the man who wrote a book called Unwoke: How to Defeat Cultural Marxism in America, and the man who can’t even say whether he will recognize the outcome of the election is, unsurprisingly, one of the least bipartisan senators.
Cruz also touted his support for in-vitro fertilization as a sign that he’s a model for moderate politics. Meanwhile, he’s become conspicuously silent about his state’s restrictive abortion laws, despite spending years as a loud and proud opponent of abortion rights, calling the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade “nothing short of a massive victory.”
Those who have worked with Cruz in politics would also probably contest his bipartisan claims.
“I probably like Ted Cruz more than most of my colleagues like Ted Cruz, and I hate Ted Cruz,” former Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) said in 2017.
Former GOP House Speaker John Boehner called Cruz “Lucifer in the flesh,” adding, “I have Democrat friends and Republican friends. I get along with almost everyone, but I have never worked with a more miserable son of a b---h in my life.”
When former President Donald Trump and Cruz faced off in the 2016 presidential primaries, The New York Times reported that many Republican insiders were “much more unnerved by Mr. Cruz, a go-it-alone, hard-right crusader.”
In April, Cruz did claim to be friends with Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), Cory Booker (D-NJ), and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN).
Cruz’s rhetorical claims to bipartisanship have an obvious rationale: He’s running for re-election in a close race against Rep. Colin Allred (D-TX), a former NFL player who represents a Dallas district, and once stoutly Republican Texas has slowly shifted blue in recent election cycles.
Allred has raised a massive war chest, outspending Cruz nearly 2-to-1 on general election TV ads, and recent polls have shown Cruz leading by just one or two points.
