How old rivals McConnell, Cruz finally found common ground — thanks to Trump
Sen. Ted Cruz will be the first to admit he and Mitch McConnell haven’t always seen eye to eye.
In 2015, seven months after McConnell became the Senate majority leader, Cruz took to the Senate floor and accused McConnell of lying about plans to authorize funding for the controversial Export-Import Bank — a stunning broadside for a rank-and-file Republican to lodge at his party’s highest-ranking senator.
In 2016, McConnell published a memoir of his political career in which he detailed ideological clashes with former Sen. Jim DeMint, R-S.C., and others but didn’t mention Cruz once — a signal to some political observers about just how little the Kentucky Republican regarded his Texas colleague.
Cruz confirmed in a recent interview with McClatchy that the two men have never discussed their disagreement, which was a flashpoint in a series of feuds going back to the time of Cruz’s election in 2012 when McConnell was the Senate minority leader.
Not until President Donald Trump took office did the two lawmakers start finding common ground.
“Mitch and I famously disagreed during the Obama years over the extent to which Republicans in Congress would stand up and resist President Obama,” said Cruz, whose unsuccessful attempts to defund the Affordable Care Act helped spark a two-week government shutdown in 2013. “I believed we could do much, much more than Mitch believed we could do.”
Now, with a shared goal of promoting a Republican president’s policies, Cruz said, “Mitch McConnell and my incentives are aligned.”
That new bond was particularly prominent during the high stakes Senate impeachment trial, when the two men joined forces to deliver a major victory for Trump and the party.
“I worked very closely, hand in hand, with Mitch, and it was very much a team effort,” Cruz said of the collaboration that led up to Trump’s acquittal.
“Senator Cruz was an important voice in our conference during the impeachment trial and continues to be a key partner during the Trump administration,” McConnell agreed in a statement to McClatchy.
Cruz made clear he was determined to make his mark on the impeachment process long before McConnell brought him into the fold by including him in senior leadership strategy sessions.
“I sat my team down and said, ‘we are going to lead on impeachment in terms of helping design the strategy and helping make the public case to explain to people what on earth is going on here,’” Cruz recalled of a conversation he had with his staff in the fall of 2019 as the House impeachment proceedings were just getting underway.
Before McConnell invited Cruz to be a part of his in-house impeachment advisory team comprised of several senators who were attorneys, Cruz had already started meeting with the president and his lawyers at the White House to “help them frame their legal strategy.”
By the end of the trial, Cruz and McConnell could boast that they had each played major roles in handing the president a “not guilty” verdict — and helped each other to that end.
“Absolutely they were at odds,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., of McConnell and Cruz. “But as Mitch says, you don’t get mad in this business. And after this vote comes another vote. And I think he and Ted have learned to work together very well, and I think it’s very helpful to the leader to have Ted as part of the team.”
A mutually beneficial relationship
Cruz set out to be a leader on impeachment. McConnell provided Cruz with one major outlet to do just that.
McConnell gave Cruz — a former constitutional lawyer who has argued cases in front of the Supreme Court — an official platform for sharing his ideas and influencing the debate.
At closed-door Senate GOP lunches, Cruz spoke about the urgency for Republicans to reinforce the message Trump committed no impeachable offense and warned about the dangers of calling additional witnesses to prolong the trial indefinitely. He educated colleagues about the dynamics at play and shared talking points that would later be embraced by the party at large.
When Cruz spoke it was with the authority of being one of the handful of GOP senators who were looped in to what the notoriously guarded McConnell was thinking and planning. He earned more respect among his peers in the process.
“His command of the legal issues gave members a place to go to ask questions on those topics when they needed to,” Sen. Roy Blunt of Missouri, a member of Senate Republican leadership, said of Cruz. “He stepped up in a significant way.”
Cruz, in turn, delivered wins for McConnell. He became what a source close to McConnell described as “an important validator” of the Senate majority leader’s vision for a tightly controlled trial that would exclude new witness testimony and secure Trump’s acquittal in under three weeks.
McConnell needed to sell this game plan to a volatile president, stubborn lawmakers and the larger Republican base that has criticized the majority leader in the past for being too much of a pragmatist.
Cruz used his reputation as an uncompromising conservative to help win broad support for this framework on and off Capitol Hill.
McConnell, who tends to work more behind-the-scenes than in front of the cameras, also came to appreciate over the course of the impeachment process how Cruz acted as an “influential communicator” on the conservative media circuit. Cruz’s impeachment podcast — at one point Apple’s most downloaded in the country — emerged as among the party’s most important messaging vehicles.
Perhaps most significantly, Cruz played a part in securing for McConnell the last two votes necessary for blocking witness testimony and moving the impeachment trial to a swift conclusion.
As senators engaged in 16 hours of questions-and-answers with Trump’s legal team and the House Democratic impeachment managers, two moderate Republican lawmakers — Alexander and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska — were still undecided about whether they needed to hear from new witnesses.
Cruz engineered the question designed to produce the answer from the White House that helped persuade Alexander and Murkowski to vote the party line.
Going forward
In their newfound working relationship, Senate Republicans attributed the improved rapport to Cruz’s transformation, not McConnell’s.
Since losing the GOP nomination to Trump in 2016 and winning reelection to the Senate by just three percentage points in 2018, Cruz is now seen as less of a firebrand and more of a team player.
“Ted has enormous abilities, and my own view is I’ve welcomed his attitude since his reelection because he’s really devoted himself to being a United States senator and it helps in a variety of ways,” Alexander told McClatchy. “He’s a very good constitutional lawyer and he helped Sen. McConnell on impeachment. He is one of our most able senators. I enjoy working with him. I did in his first term but I’ve enjoyed it a lot more the second term.”
Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., agreed Cruz had a different posture “five years ago versus the last three or four years, maybe.”
Cruz disagreed with their view that he has changed, saying the changed political landscape is what has made a difference in how he operates.
“Coming back from the 2016 election, my role in the conference became very different,” Cruz said. “The week after the Nov. 2016 election, I went to Trump Tower and spent four and a half hours with the president and his senior team, laying out that I wanted to do everything humanly possible to lead the fight in the senate, to deliver on the promises we had made to the American people.”
Since that time, Cruz has helped McConnell get within striking distance of Republican consensus to repeal and replace the Democrats’ 2010 health law. He bolstered the majority leader’s fight to confirm embattled Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh and was a cheerleader for the GOP’s landmark tax overhaul legislation.
Cruz declined to answer whether he regretted the accusations he lodged against McConnell in 2015 or if he was concerned their working relationship would last only as long as a Republican remained in the White House.
“I hope we can continue working together to produce results and honor the commitments we made to the voters,” Cruz said.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who worked with Cruz on drafting the pivotal question for Alexander and Murkowski, said McConnell will surely consider Cruz an enduring ally now, post-impeachment, if he didn’t already.
“He should,” Graham said with a chuckle of whether McConnell might have a new appreciation for Cruz. “The bar was pretty low, but he should.”
This story was originally published February 19, 2020 at 1:47 PM with the headline "How old rivals McConnell, Cruz finally found common ground — thanks to Trump."
