While most of us were sleeping last night, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz spent all night talking in what may be the strangest “almost but not technically” filibuster you’ll ever see.
Reaching back to fifth grade government class, a filibuster is a speech made by a congressman (in the federal government, it can only be a senator because representatives are time limited in their speeches) that attempts to delay or prevent voting on a bill by speaking for an inordinate amount of time. Technically speaking, filibusters can go on forever, but are realistically limited by the same time restrictions that humans face in completing any task for a long time — eventually you’ll have to go to the bathroom, or your legs will give out, or your mouth will run dry, or some other body part will tire.
Cruz’s speech certainly meets the time requirement (it is the fourth-longest speech ever given on the Senate floor), but was never meant to delay a vote. The vote for the budget legislation that this quasi–filibuster was about was to be held this afternoon no matter what — if Cruz had still been talking, he would have been procedurally forced to stop. Because the speech ultimately had no bearing on when the legislation was voted on, it’s not technically a filibuster.
In fact, Cruz wouldn’t have chosen to delay the vote even if he could. Budget legislation like this one comes up fairly often, without them the government wouldn’t have authorization to spend money, leading in short order to a total shutdown. What makes this particular legislation special is that House Republicans added a section to it that would completely defundthe Affordable Care Act (affectionately called ObamaCare by many), now and in the future. The legislation passed the Republican controlled House of Representatives, but Cruz knew it wouldn’t pass the Democratic Senate with the provision defunding the ACA still attached. Cruz’s speech was meant to chew up all of the discussion time on the bill, preventing Democrats from being able to speak against it.
Ultimately, Cruz’s long–winded speech has no measurable effect on the Senate. He didn’t delay the voting, and the Democrats still cut out the defunding section. But don’t count it as a failure just yet.
What this massive monologue was really meant to do was increase Cruz’s national attention and name recognition. Republicans are already jockeying for position in the 2016 presidential field, and Cruz is one of several names that have been mentioned, among others like Chris Christie, Michele Bachmann, Paul Ryan, and Marco Rubio.
Another name that has been mentioned in these talks that is particularly important in relation to Cruz is Rand Paul. You may remember him from the Senate’s last filibuster, when Paul spoke out against the use of drones against U.S. citizens and various other CIA programs.
Paul and Cruz are linked by more than just their affinity for terribly long speeches. They are among the most recognizable faces of a new breed of Republicans. They represent a kind of Republican–Libertarian hybrid, softer than the average Republican on things like gay marriage and drugs, while less hawkish than members of their party like Sen. John McCain on foreign policy issues (both Paul and Cruz spoke against involvement in Syria). Even more stark is the contrast between the Paul–Cruz Republicans and the rest of the party on privacy issues, where they have repeatedly attacked traditional Republicans for their “you have nothing to fear if you have nothing to hide” policy.
This sector of the Republican party has been largely marginalized by their peers (you may have heard of Rand Paul’s father, Ron Paul, who espoused a very similar platform to the one his son now runs on), but as the national debt continues to skyrocket and our civil liberties are sacrificed on the altar to the global war on terror, the number and strength of this group will continue to rise.
With this group growing and the traditional Republicans increasingly finding their platform out of date, and therefore having difficulty winning elections, we are beginning to see a paradigm shift within the Republican Party. The old guard, led by John McCain and South Carolina’s own Sen. Lindsey Graham, is on its way out. As the new guard comes in to replace them, they’ll have to sacrifice some of their current platform to appeal to the traditional Republican base. The Paul and Cruz we see today will certainly seem like extreme caricatures of the ones we see a decade from now, but thanks in part to stunts like these filibusters and quasi–filibusters, those Paul’s and Cruz’s will be the face of a revitalized Republican Party.