Charlie Spiering:
“Good impressions are pretty good, but actually bad impressions are even better,” Sen. Ted Cruz said Friday at a Texas Public Policy Foundation conference, admitting that his staffers cringed every time he tried to do an imitation of someone he was quoting.
Cruz smiled and then channeled his Senate predecessor, Phil Gramm, who introduced Cruz at the conference.
“This will pass over my cold dead political body,” he quoted Gramm, imitating his deep Texas drawl — referring to a quote from Gramm in the early 1990s, crediting him with successfully killing then-first lady Hillary Clinton’s public insurance proposal.
That sums up Cruz’s political strategy for the upcoming year, which promises to be just as controversial as the first. The second-year senator from Texas previewed his political agenda in the speech: Fight President Obama.
It’s the same aggressive tone Cruz brought to the Senate in his first year, as he challenged his colleagues on gun control and immigration, but most of all on Obamacare, arguably Obama’s biggest political challenge of the year.
“Of all of the bad things that have happened, I think one of the most dangerous is the consistent pattern of lawlessness from this president and this administration,” Cruz said, pointing out that Obama could “pick and choose” which parts of the law he would enforce.
Cruz cited Obama’s decision to delay Obamacare for businesses and adjust the law for members of Congress among the legal abuses enacted by the president and his administration.
After making several jokes at the president’s expense, Cruz got serious.
“Look there is a level at which all of this is ludicrous, but there is another level at which all of this is incredibly dangerous and terrifying,” he said solemnly as the audience applauded.
