The Briefing Room
General Category => Politics/Government => Topic started by: mystery-ak on January 14, 2017, 03:07:11 pm
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How Cruz and Trump learned to like each other
Ted Cruz was once one of Donald Trump’s most vocal critics. Now he's one of the president-elect's most important Senate allies.
By Eliana Johnson
01/13/17 07:47 PM EST
Ted Cruz met with Donald Trump exactly one week after Election Day. As it turned out, Cruz’s tete-a-tete with the president-elect he had spurned from the stage of the Republican National Convention just months before wasn’t the most consequential meeting he would have that day.
After his talk with Trump, the Texas senator and his chief of staff, David Polyansky, then sat down with his chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, who sounded him out about his interest in filling the Supreme Court vacancy created by the late Antonin Scalia. Cruz — widely considered one of the best Supreme Court litigators of his generation — swatted down the idea, according to four people to whom he has relayed the conversation.
more
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/trump-ted-cruz-allies-233622
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Cruz’s high-profile snub of Trump at the Republican convention overshadowed a web of personal connections between the two men. Both Bannon and Trump deputy campaign manager David Bossie, who has for years overseen the conservative grassroots organization Citizens United, are longtime Cruz friends. Kellyanne Conway, who served as Trump’s campaign manager and will head to the West Wing with him, ran a super PAC that supported Cruz’s presidential campaign before she joined the Trump team. And Trump transition aide Jason Miller previously served as the Cruz campaign’s communications director.
Those ties have helped to foster a far more productive relationship between Cruz and Trump than many had expected. During his visit to Trump Tower in November, Cruz discussed two pieces of legislation with Trump’s team, and they agreed to push forward on them together. The first is a constitutional amendment Cruz introduced earlier this month along with Florida Congressman Ron DeSantis, that would limit senators to two terms and congressmen to three. The second, the Super PAC Elimination Act, would allow donors, whose contributions are capped at $2,700 per campaign, to give unlimited sums to federal political candidates.
They will also work together on legislation Cruz introduced on Thursday to defund the United Nations in retaliation for its vote late last month to condemn Israeli settlement building.
http://www.politico.com/story/2017/01/trump-ted-cruz-allies-233622
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No surprise to me.
I, well, for a while expected Cruz to be the VP.
I know I am silly, but yeh, that is what I thought was going to happen.
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From the Article:
Several of Cruz’s closest allies said that despite his deep interest in the law, he turned his back on a potential Supreme Court nomination because he is fundamentally a political creature. “I think the bottom line with Ted is that the monastic life of a Supreme Court justice is simply not something that appeals to him at this stage in his life and that’s notwithstanding the fact that he has already in his young legal career established himself as one of the nation’s premier Supreme Court advocates,” said a longtime Cruz friend. “But being on that side of the lectern is a different thing. He’s an advocate, he’s passionate about advancing the causes he believes in.”
It’s something of an open secret among Cruz allies that the reason Cruz swatted down the Supreme Court inquiry is the same as the one propelling his eager cooperation with Trump: Despite Trump's victory and Bannon’s overtures, his political ambitions are still simmering. He wants to be president and, at the age of 45, still thinks he can pull it off.
Cruz v2.0, more bells and whistles and less animosity toward his fellow cretins. What's not to like?
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Cruz is gonna be around for awhile.
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Ted Cruz, or, How I Learned to Stop Caring and Love the R
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It doesn't say that Cruz "likes" Trump, merely that they are getting along on some points. Not sure what the story is.