‘I’ve been amazed how many senators pose one way in public … and then in private do little or nothing.’
Ted Cruz’s campaign against his Republican colleagues — especially Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell — is getting increasingly personal.
The freshman senator from Texas has never shied from attacking the men and women whom he works alongside each day. But Cruz, lodged in the middle of the 2016 GOP presidential pack, is taking his criticism of fellow Republican senators to a new level — rhetorically and in his new book out Tuesday, “A Time for Truth.”
Cruz accuses McConnell and GOP leadership of maneuvering to dry up his fundraising and plant hit pieces in the press aimed at hurting him politically. He says GOP leaders cowered from joining him in big fights over the debt ceiling, Obamacare and gun control, accusing his colleagues of “mendacity” and capitulating to Democrats to avoid bad headlines.
He contends that McConnell misled him in vowing to stay out of primaries when Cruz accepted a senior-level position at the National Republican Senatorial Committee. And he accuses a GOP rival, Rand Paul of Kentucky, of parroting McConnell’s talking points by seeking to “undermine” his efforts to defund Obamacare during the 2013 fight that led to the government shutdown.
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