I’m not a sixth-grader. I’m not a lawyer, but after 20 years, I’ve been up close and personal to the Constitution. I have great respect for it. … It’s fine you want to lecture me on the Constitution. I appreciate it. Just know I’ve been here for a long time. I’ve passed on a number of bills. I’ve studied the Constitution myself. I am reasonably well-educated, and I thank you for the lecture.Sen. Dianne Feinstein • Responding to Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, who Sen. Feinstein believed was giving her an unrequested/undesired lecture on the U.S. Constitution and the wording used in its creation. The conflict arose during a heated debate between the two on a gun control bill (sponsored by Sen. Feinstein) which would ban the sale and manufacture of more than 150 types of military weapons, and was approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday. source
[President Obama] would have made a perfect president of Harvard Law School. …There were fewer declared Republicans in the faculty when we were there than Communists! There was one Republican. But there were twelve who would say they were Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.Senator Ted Cruz • From a speech he gave a couple years ago, before the start of his Senate career, at a conference sponsored by Americans For Prosperity, which elicited this rather sensational question from the New Yorker’s Jane Meyer: “Is Senator Ted Cruz our new McCarthy?” Cruz’s eye-popping claim, that a dozen faculty members at Harvard Law from 1992-1995 (when Cruz attended) supported a Communist overthrow of the U.S. government, is disputed by Charles Fried, a professor at the school (and former Reagan administration Solicitor General) who himself taught Cruz: “…there were a certain number (twelve seems to me too high) who were quite radical, but I doubt if any had allegiance or sympathy with anything called ‘the Communists,’ who at that time (unlike the thirties and forties) were in quite bad odor among radical intellectuals. …[He was] very bright, very hard-working and very conservative, in a well-mannered, agreeable way. This surprises me. It suggests he’s changed.” source
If Republicans do not do better in the Hispanic community, in a few short years Republicans will no longer be the majority party in our state. If that happens, no Republican will ever again win the White House. New York and California are for the foreseeable future unalterably Democrat. If Texas turns bright blue, the Electoral College math is simple. We won’t be talking about Ohio, we won’t be talking about Florida or Virginia, because it won’t matter. If Texas is bright blue, you can’t get to two-seventy electoral votes. The Republican Party would cease to exist. We would become like the Whig Party.Republican Senator-Elect Ted Cruz • Discussing the GOP’s need for better outreach in Hispanic and Latino communities around the country, but particularly in his home state of Texas. The Lone Star State, and its 38 electoral college votes, remain central to the Republican Party’s presidential election strategy, and its loss could prove insurmountable for the GOP. While no one is suggesting such a flip will happen by 2016 (or even 2020), Cruz’s concerns follow similar comments made by one of former presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s own advisers last week. source
» Not much bang for the buck: Tons of money is needed to get a political campaign off the ground, but that doesn’t mean being rich out of the gate is a sure-fire win for wannabe politicians. In 2010, wrestling magnate Linda McMahon spent $50 million on her own Senate campaign only to be crushed by Richard Blumenthal, who’d raised a (relatively) modest $8.7 million. More recently, Texas Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst lost the GOP primary after giving $24 million to his own war chest—the most so far of any candidate this cycle. But this doesn’t seem to be discouraging wealthy candidates: McMahon is running for the Senate again this year, and her $8.8 million contribution constitutes 90% of what she’s raised so far.
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A new face of the Republican party? With former Texas Solicitor General Ted Cruz pulling off a dramatic win in a runoff for a Senate seat on Tuesday, Cruz becomes just the latest example of the GOP’s increasing diversity. WIth a number of increasingly successful Republicans who aren’t white — including Cruz, Sen. Marco Rubio, Gov. Nikki Haley and Gov. Bobby Jindal, among others — the Republican Party may be slowly starting to break from the past. “In the 2016 or 2020 Republican presidential primary, it’s easy to see a contest that includes Jindal and Rubio in its top tier,” notes Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post. (photo by Pat Sullivan/AP)
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