Ted Cruz is absolutely the huge winner here. He got to be the ringleader fighting the good fight against the hated brown usurper, without the hassle and inconvenience of actually being on the hook for the credit default. Notice that Rand Paul and Marco Rubio, his likely rivals in two years, also made sure to vote against the deal. They’re going to be smoking the straight Dixie all the way to 2016, because whenever Ted Cruz wakes up in the morning, he looks in the mirror and sees the 45th President of the United States.
If he’d won, he’d have to face the consequences of sandbagging Obamacare – restoring discrimination based on pre-existing conditions, kicking freshly-minted college grads off their parents’ insurance, eliminating options for people who can’t get insurance now – and the consequences of trashing the economic system associated with an American default. But without those, he can howl about “friendly fire” and say that if only the Senate had more like him, they would win. In the classic “Folkways of the US Senate” dichotomy, Ted Cruz is the Platonic ideal of the show horse.
But he’s learned one lesson that so many in the GOP have learned. After all, the Democrats have only had complete control of the elected federal government (House, Senate, Presidency) for a whopping total of 8 years since 1969. The Republicans only had it for 4 or 5, but they also had at least two pieces of the puzzle from 1981-86 and 1995-2007. And they’ve had a majority of the Supreme Court appointees since about 1990 as well. So…why isn’t there prayer in school? Why is abortion still broadly legal? Why is there no flat tax?
The GOP at large and Ted Cruz in particular have learned a lesson that any profession wrestling aficionado has always known. The money isn’t in winning the championship…the money’s in the chase.