A Time for Truth: Reigniting the Promise of America Read online

  Table of Contents

  DEDICATION

  Dedication

  INTRODUCTION

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  INTRODUCTION

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  5

  6

  7

  8

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  CHAPTER 1

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  CHAPTER 2

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  CHAPTER 3

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  CHAPTER 4

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  3

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  CHAPTER 5

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  CHAPTER 6

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  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

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  15

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  17

  18

  19

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  26

  27

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  28

  29

  30

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  CHAPTER 7

  1

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  CHAPTER 8

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  CHAPTER 9

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  CHAPTER 10

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  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

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  11

  12

  13

  14

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  CHAPTER 11

  1

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  3

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  4

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  PHOTOGRAPHS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOTES

  1.

  4.

  5.

  6.

  DEDICATION

  This book is dedicated to my parents, for their inspiration,

  strength of character, and unconditional love.

  It is dedicated to my wife Heidi—my best friend

  in all the world—and our precious daughters Caroline

  and Catherine, who are the joys of our life.

  And it is dedicated to truth-tellers and freedom fighters,

  to the grassroots and the courageous conservatives

  whose passion and leadership

  are turning our great nation around.

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  INTRODUCTION

  Mendacity

  CHAPTER 1

  The Beacon

  CHAPTER 2

  To the Lone Star State

  CHAPTER 3

  Enter the Ivies

  CHAPTER 4

  May It Please the Court

  CHAPTER 5

  The Bush Administration

  CHAPTER 6

  Upholding the Law

  CHAPTER 7

  Question #10: A Grassroots

  Campaign for the U.S. Senate

  CHAPTER 8

  Into the Beast

  CHAPTER 9

  The Obamacare Battle

  CHAPTER 10

  Obama’s Vacuum of Leadership

  CHAPTER 11

  Reigniting the Promise of America

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Index

  About the Author

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  INTRODUCTION

  Mendacity

  Pandemonium ensued. There were angry glares, heated accusations. Red-faced name-calling echoed off the walls and vaulted ceilings in a room just off the main corridor of the U.S. Capitol. It was Tuesday, February 11, 2014. Another lunch of the Senate Republicans.

  I’d been a regular part of these gatherings ever since I was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2012. Most, if not all, of the then forty-five members of the Republican conference usually attended; these were, literally, free lunches after all, in some of the most beautiful rooms in the U.S. Capitol. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, we met in the Lyndon B. Johnson Room, an expansive chamber adorned with ceiling frescoes by the Italian artist Constantino Brumidi, a large gilded mirror, an opulent chandelier, and marble-paneled walls. On Wednesdays we met in the Mike Mansfield Room, a wood-paneled rectangular conference room named for the late Senate majority leader from Montana.

  Typically the party lunches were civil discussions—somewhat plodding, and occasionally instructive. On this day, however, civility was not on the menu.

  At this lunch, the duly elected members of the U.S. Senate—many who’d served in the august body for decades—were yelling. Not simply raising their voices or speaking loudly, but angrily yelling at their colleagues in the room who had committed what I had quickly come to learn was the cardinal sin of Washington, D.C.: telling the truth.

  The events of that week provided yet another example of just how bad things in our nation’s capital had become.

  The issue at hand was the federal debt ceiling. Periodically it fell to the U.S. Congress to vote to raise the amount of debt the federal government can accumulate in order to continue its current spending levels.

  As a U.S. senator, Democrat Barack Obama voted repeatedly against President George W. Bush’s efforts to raise the debt ceiling, calling the need for such a vote a sign of “failed leadership.”1 In 2006, Obama had declared that “increasing America’s debt weakens us domestically and internationally.” He added at one point that “Washington is shifting the burden of bad choices today onto the backs of our children and grandchildren. America has a debt problem and a failure of leadership. Americans deserve better.”2

  This seemingly principled position changed dramatically when Obama won the presidency. This sadly is not surprising in Washington, D.C.—a place where principles are fungible, often lasting only until the next election.

  Not only did President Obama abandon Senator Obama’s position on the debt. He made the situation far worse. Never in the history of our country have we had a spender like Barack Obama. When the president took office, our debt was just over $10 trillion, itself a sizable figure; today the debt is over $18 trillion. Just think about that for a moment—it took forty-three presidents nearly 220 years to accumulate $10 trillion in debt.* In just six years, President Obama has almost doubled that. Our total debt
is now larger than our entire economy. Today roughly 40 cents of every dollar that the federal government spends is borrowed money, which we will have to repay for years to come.3

  In the early months of 2014, President Obama was urging Democrats and Republicans to pass yet another increase of the debt ceiling, so we could spend even more. The president was demanding from Congress what he called a “clean” bill. In the backwards parlance of Washington, the definition of “clean” was adding trillions more in debt without including any reforms to arrest Washington’s out-of-control spending. That didn’t seem very clean to me.

  President Obama needed Congress’s help to carry out his spending plans. I saw this as an opportunity. Historically the vote on the debt ceiling has proven to be one of the few tools that the U.S. Congress has been able to use to achieve any modicum of success reining in the size and power of the federal government. In the previous 55 times that Congress had raised the debt ceiling, it attached significant conditions to the legislation 28 times. In 1985, for example, Congress conditioned a debt-ceiling increase on the passage of the Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act, one of the most constructive bipartisan efforts to rein in federal spending in modern times. In 2010, Congress used its leverage to pass the so-called Budget Control Act—which both parties touted as a serious effort to reduce federal spending. (In reality, the BCA didn’t actually “cut” spending; it simply slowed its growth. And Congress has already abandoned some of those modest spending restraints.)

  For months leading up to this moment, Republican leaders had pledged to their constituents that when it came time to raise the federal debt limit, they would demand meaningful spending reforms from this president. Rest assured, we were told, the Republicans would insist on it! Those of us who had fought so hard to stop Obamacare the previous year had been told, by these wizened D.C. insiders, that we had picked the wrong fight; the real fight should be over the debt ceiling.

  Indeed, just days before our combative February lunch, Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell, appearing on Fox News Sunday, had pledged: “I think for the president to ask for a clean debt ceiling, when we have a debt the size of our economy is irresponsible. So, we ought to discuss adding something to his request to raise the debt ceiling that does something about the debt or produces at least something positive for our country.”4 Given those public commitments, it would have been natural to expect that our lunch discussion that day would have focused on these positive “somethings” the voters were promised, to start us on a track back to fiscal sanity.

  That hadn’t happened. Just a week earlier, the GOP leadership in the House of Representatives had buckled. They had joined with 193 Democrats to run over 199 House Republicans and give President Obama the “clean” debt increase that he had demanded. Sadly, Senate Republican leaders wanted us to do the exact same thing.

  This wasn’t a total shock to me. I had figured all along that our GOP leadership, like so many times before, would offer some halfhearted proposal to deal with spending and then, under pressure, eventually surrender to the Democrats. Caving in to the president’s demands had been our modus operandi for far too long. But I never thought that surrendering would be our starting position.

  But it was worse than that. Much worse.

  The U.S. Senate cherishes its myriad rules, traditions, and protocols. This sometimes produces great frustration to many of us trying to get something done, since many of these rules are vestiges of a bygone era. But this time the rules played to our advantage. For decades, the ordinary procedure in the Senate has been that in order to move to proceed to take up a debt-ceiling increase, 60 senators must vote in favor of the motion. At the time, the Senate had 55 Democrats, which meant that 5 Republicans would have to support taking up the vote. That gave our side significant bargaining power with the Democrats and the White House.

  Obviously the Democrats didn’t want that. But neither did the Republican Senate leadership.

  In the Senate, any rule can be changed by unanimous consent, which takes, as the name implies, the affirmative consent of all one hundred senators. And so, as our lunch began, the members of the Republican leadership stood before us and asked every senator to join with the Democrats in granting unanimous consent to lower the 60-vote threshold to take up the debt ceiling to just 50 votes.

  None of us should oppose this, we were told, and for two reasons. First, if we lowered the threshold, then the “clean” debt ceiling would pass, and that was very much the outcome the leadership assumed each of us really desired.

  And second, if we consented to lowering the threshold, Democrats would then have the votes to raise the debt ceiling on their own. We could all vote no. This way, we could return home and tell the voters that we had opposed raising the debt ceiling, right after consenting to let it happen.

  This time I was stunned by the chicanery, expressed openly, if not proudly, to the rest of us. Looking around the Lyndon Johnson Room, named for one of the biggest-spending presidents in American history, I had a new appreciation for why we were gathered here, beneath his smiling portrait. Most senators seemed perfectly fine with the leadership’s proposal. There were nods and murmurs of assent.*

  It was too much. I raised my hand and said, “There’s no universe in which I can consent to that.”

  I had spent two years promising Texans that if they voted for me I would fight with every breath in my body to stop the out-of-control spending and debt that is bankrupting our kids and grandkids. I explained, “If I were to affirmatively consent to making it easier for Democratic Senate leader Harry Reid to add trillions in debt—with no spending reforms whatsoever—I think it would be dishonest and unfaithful to the voters who elected me.”

  This was an obvious point. Every one of these senators had promised their constituents that they’d oppose tricks like this to add to our debt. But as it happened, the only other senator in the room who spoke up to agree with me was Mike Lee, the junior senator from Utah and a staunch fiscal conservative. Lee, my closest friend in the Senate, was another troublemaker in the eyes of Republican leaders.

  In the two years I’ve been in the Senate, nothing I have said or done has engendered more venom and animosity from my fellow Republicans than the simple objection I made that afternoon. Indeed, the issue coalesced the rage that career politicians already felt for upstarts like me.

  That was when the yelling began or, what outlets such as National Review more politely called “a spirited exchange between [Cruz], McConnell, and others.”5

  When I made my case to my colleagues, they looked at me like I was a fool. I heard more than one variation of “That’s what you say to folks back home. You don’t actually do it.” They were convinced that they had a brilliant maneuver to increase our debt without any fingerprints. And here was a freshman senator with the temerity to screw it all up.

  Don’t you understand what we are doing? senators thundered. Why are you forcing us to tackle this? Why can’t you just go along?

  One of the saddest aspects of Washington is that when you stand for principle, and actually seem to mean it, the typical response is “What are you really up to?” Almost nobody just tells the truth in Washington. There’s always an ulterior motive. You’re trying to raise money. You’re building an email list. You’re preening for the cameras. You’re running for president. Anything other than that you’re doing what you’re doing because you believe in every fiber of your being it’s the right thing.

  The yelling during our lunches continued over the entire week.

  Sitting through the harangues wasn’t terribly difficult, as long as I remembered that I didn’t work for the Senate leadership but for 26 million Texans. Frankly, I’ve found the more reviled you are in Washington, the more they appreciate you in places like Waco, and Dallas, and San Antonio.

  Still, it was surreal to see Republican senators—some of who were conservative icons—turn purple over this issue. The fulminations went on and on against me and my crazy idea that senators
ought to vote “yes” on what they support and “no” on what they oppose.

  Over time it occurred to me that what was prompting the greatest anger was not that I opposed raising the debt ceiling. What infuriated them was that by objecting to the unanimous consent deal they had cut, it forced those Republicans who wanted the debt ceiling raised to actually admit so in public with their recorded vote. It prevented them from misleading their constituents.

  It’s often suggested that constitutional conservatives dislike compromise. That’s the attack the media likes to wage on folks on the right—even though to them compromise is just giving the Democrats whatever they are asking for. In fact, I’m happy to compromise—with Democrats, Republicans, Independents, or Libertarians (heck, I’ve joked I’ll compromise with Martians!)—if we are actually shrinking the size, power, or spending of the government. If we are expanding individual liberty or defending the Constitution.

  I tried to make the case that if we all stood together, we could force the Democrats to compromise for once. To work with us on spending restraints. Just as Republicans and Democrats had done with different presidents in the past. Just as Barack Obama had once insisted that Democrats do with the Bush administration. I wasn’t looking to pass a flat tax or a sweeping proposal to rein in entitlement spending once and for all. We were a minority party in the Senate, and John Boehner had already caved in the House. It was obvious we couldn’t get everything we wanted. But was the alternative abject surrender?

  My position was not that we should never raise the debt ceiling. That’s not a responsible position, unless you are prepared to cut the federal budget by 40 percent overnight (which no one has proposed a sensible path to doing). So I offered the conference a few concrete, relatively modest suggestions for what Republicans could get out of the debt ceiling. For one, I argued that Republicans could insist on attaching legislation to the debt ceiling bill that prohibited bailing out big insurance companies under Obamacare. This would address one of the biggest sources of our looming fiscal crisis. Under the current law, Obamacare automatically funnels billions of tax dollars to bail out giant insurance companies. That was how the Obama administration won those companies’ support. And it would be very hard for Senate Democrats to fight. How many Democrats, in an election year, would want to die on the barricades to defend insurance company bailouts?