Ted Cruz's Do-Nothing Record
There’s one element of the Senate race in Texas that has gotten surprisingly little attention: Ted Cruz’s astonishingly thin legislative record. As his first term comes to a close, he might as well have not been in Congress at all. Cruz has passed only two of his own bills and frequently brags about an amendment that allows parents to save for private school tuition tax-free; none of them has had much practical impact on his constituents. He takes credit for Harvey relief but played an ancillary role in securing it.
Cruz’s tea party base sent him to Washington, D.C., to break stuff, not do stuff. He’s an obstructionist, not a problem-solver. In that respect, he sits well outside a long, bipartisan tradition in which the Texas congressional delegation understood its primary responsibility to be advancing Texas’ material interests. He’s not alone in that — he’s part of a trend. And whenever I think about that trend, I think about Waxahachie.
For a time in the 1980s and ’90s, the North Texas town of Waxahachie was set to become one of the most important scientific hubs in history, thanks to the Superconducting Super Collider, or SSC, which would have been the most advanced particle accelerator in the world. The SSC would have brought some of the brightest physicists to Texas to figure out what makes up the universe and how it was formed.
There was no reason the SSC should have been in Texas, except for the strength of the Texas congressional delegation — particularly Jim Wright, an important member of House leadership, who represented nearby Fort Worth. At that time, the delegation consisted of good ol’ boys stuck deep in the crevices of power in the capital, men who knew how to bring home federal largesse. They knew that a major cause of Texas’ success, as much as people might like to forget it now, was good old-fashioned pork.
Read more: https://www.texasobserver.org/ted-cruzs-do-nothing-record/
