Which Republican Fed The Oppo Research On Right Wing Extremist Ted Cruz To Fox News' Chris Wallace?

Karl Rove was on Fox News Sunday this week when Chris Wallace announced that "as soon as we listed Ted Cruz as our featured guest this week, I got unsolicited research and questions, not from Democrats but from top Republicans, to hammer Cruz." Accusations started flying across the wingnut blogosphere. McConnell, panic-striken, immediately denied that it was him or any of this staffers trying to undermine Cruz. Palin, sensing an opportunity for some attention, jumped into the fray, demanding, via Twitter, Wallace release the names of the guilty Republicans. The Tweet, which she has deleted from her account, scared Fox might cut off her checks and take away her platform:

Other right-wing sources blamed Rove and some pointed to McCain. Wallace refuses to say who he was referring to, although disdain and even hatred for Cruz among Republican careerists who fear losing their jobs if they follow (or don't follow) him over the extremist cliff, is rampant and growing. The Cruz profile in the new GQ isn't going to do anything to dampen down the intra-party feuding.

For a while, veteran Republicans groused in private about the new guy. But it boiled over when Cruz joined Kentucky senator Rand Paul's filibuster of John Brennan's nomination to head the CIA—an act of protest against Obama's drone program. John McCain, already seething over Cruz's treatment of Hagel, called them "wacko birds." "He fucking hates Cruz," one adviser of the Arizona senator told me. "He's just offended by his style."

The "wacko bird" dig, however, has only endeared Cruz more to his party's purist wing. Already his fans are nudging him to think about a presidential run in 2016, and he's nudging right back, making trips to Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina. He's even embraced "wacko bird," reclaiming McCain's knock as a badge of honor. Later on the day I visited him on Capitol Hill, Cruz was engaging in the kind of showing off that even his detractors might forgive: He was giving me a tour of his Senate office. "A couple of things I keep," he said, picking up a red leather rectangle branded with the words IT CAN BE DONE-- a replica, he explained, of the sign that sat on President Reagan's desk in the Oval Office. The tchotchke he was most excited to show me, however, was a black baseball cap with a picture of Daffy Duck next to the words WACKO BIRD. Supporters back in Texas made it, Cruz said, grabbing the hat from its prominent perch on his bookshelf. "Isn't it great?"

..."I cannot tell you," Cruz says now, "how many little old ladies clasped my shoulder and said, 'Ted, please don't go to Washington and become one of them.'"

The little old ladies of Texas ought to be doing cartwheels. Instead of becoming one of them, Cruz has scorched almost all of them. He's reserved his most scathing criticism for his fellow Senate Republicans-- branding those who've had the temerity to stake out not-far-right-enough positions as "squishes" and the "surrender caucus." I asked one of Cruz's colleagues, Iowa Republican Chuck Grassley, if he could recall a freshman behaving as brashly as Cruz. Grassley has been in the Senate for thirty-three years. He was stumped. "Not somebody I've served with," he said finally. "I think Barry Goldwater-- reading the history of Barry Goldwater, he made those sorts of impressions right away."

It's unclear exactly how many wacko birds are in the Senate right at this moment, but by Cruz's count there are at least three-- Rand Paul, Lee, and himself. And three, he says, is a lot. "I do think the impact of a handful of principled leaders who are fearless in the Senate is significant, and I think it's significant even going from two to three. If you have three, you pretty quickly get to five or six. Five or six is over 10 percent of the Republican conference, and that's enough to move a conference and move the Senate."

...Some Republicans are so spooked about drawing a conservative primary challenger in next year's midterms-- or, as it's now called in Texas circles, "being Ted Cruzed"-- that they've moved even farther to the right, paralyzing the Senate's GOP leadership. Exhibit A: John Cornyn, Cruz's fellow senator from Texas. "He has Cornyn just frozen on everything," one senior Senate Republican aide grumbled to me. "A member of our leadership just kind of takes his marching orders from this guy who's been here for a day!"

  That may be a problem for Republicans, but not necessarily for Cruz. "We're in a moment when the combination of being hard-core and intelligent is really at a premium," says National Review writer Ramesh Ponnuru, who's been friends with Cruz since they went to Princeton together. "Because the two things that conservatives are tired of are politicians who sell out and politicians who embarrass them by not being able to make an account of themselves." In this arithmetic, Mitt Romney is the sellout and Sarah Palin is the embarrassment-- and Cruz is the great new hope who brings the virtues of both without the liabilities of either. 

Cruz made it clear what he thinks of McCain as well. "I don't know a conservative who didn't feel embarrassed voting in 2006 or 2008. I think the Republican Party lost its way. We didn't stand for the principles we're supposed to believe in." Early Monday morning, McCain sent this tweet pimping a Douglas Holtz-Eakin article to his 1.8 million followers:

Holtz-Eakin was the top economic and health care policy advisor to McCain during his 2008 presidential run but many remember him for claiming that McCain invented the BlackBerry. Now he's the head of an obscure right-wing think tank. He can often be found articulating the incoherent stratagems of Beltway Establishment Conservatives:

The public budget debate has been hijacked by a vociferous minority of activist conservatives aligned with a number of outside activist groups led by the likes of Sen. Ted Cruz and former Sen. Jim DeMint.

Using a variety of political threats and purity tests, they have been demanding a vote on a bill to fund the government that includes "defunding Obamacare." Now that the House has passed the funding bill, they are getting their chance to prove that their strategy will work. Here's why it won't:

Resistance to the proposal had been based not on any love for President Obama's health care scheme, but on a balancing of the chances for success of this strategy against the risks inherent in presenting Mr. Obama and the Senate with an ultimatum that will cause neither to back down.

Let's look at what might happen. The House on Friday passed a bill that will keep the government funded through mid-December and would defund Obamacare. However, Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid will amend it to strip out defunding, shorten the time period for which the government is funded, drop in a few progressive favorites, run the clock, and send it back to the House as close to the Sept. 30 deadline as possible. If so, at least Senate Democrats will be forced to vote for or against Obamacare. This, given public hostility to the plan, should cause some of them heartburn, thereby buying the same thing that would have been accomplished by House Speaker John A. Boehner's earlier proposal that was dismissed by these same folks as a mere "gimmick."

In fact, Mr. Cruz has already conceded this scenario is likely. After months of tweets, town halls and chest-thumping about the House needing to take the fight to the Senate, Mr. Cruz volunteered that Mr. Reid "likely has the votes" to "strip the defund language" just one day after the strategy was announced. Talk about irony when the leading senator yelling at the House to "fight" for three months concedes defeat on Day One of the ball being in his court.

This all-but-assured reality is unfortunate not only because it won't work, but also because the original House strategy would have.

Indeed, the speaker's proposal would have forced a "clean" vote on Obamacare that would have forced Democratic senators running next year to either embrace Obamacare or vote against the president's pet proposal. Instead, the outside groups' litmus tests would yield a strategy that allows Senate Democratic leaders to "muddy" the vote by including their preferred provisions.

Worse, once the bill is sent back, House Republicans will be forced to vote with their backs to the wall. They will either have to accept the Democratic counterproposal or be blamed for a government shutdown. The bottom line is that this approach could and may well allow the White House and Democratic Senate to control the endgame-- to the detriment of Republicans, but not the unaccountable outside activists.

Worse yet, the funding bill might fail, actually forcing a government shutdown. Most federal employees would be sent home, but "essential" personnel would be required to continue working. In particular, the exemption for cases of "emergency involving the safety of human life or the protection of property" means that the armed forces would remain on duty during a shutdown without pay. Our troops would remain in harm's way and their families will not have money for food, rent, clothing or schools simply because, as the president will argue, Republicans pursued a partisan political agenda. Not exactly a winning argument.

The same activists dismiss these concerns, arguing that voters will rally behind Republicans because the public does not support Obamacare. However, this is far from guaranteed, as Republicans should have learned in the 1990s.

A Pew poll taken in January 1996 showed that 62 percent of Americans thought a balanced budget was very important, and that if a balanced budget were to be achieved, 47 percent thought that Republicans in Congress deserved the credit versus 31 percent for President Clinton.

However, a November 1995 Gallup poll indicated that the majority of those polled thought the budget battle was about political advantage (52 percent) rather than principles (37 percent). Another poll by NBC taken during the second shutdown showed that only 17 percent thought the fight was about policy principles, compared with 76 percent thinking the fight was political.

The same dynamic will prevail today, only worse, because in the 1990s Congress had already funded the troops before the shutdown.

On top of all this, a shutdown won't defund Obamacare. Entitlement programs such as Obamacare are largely unaffected by the annual funding appropriations. The money goes out on autopilot. Even ongoing Obamacare implementation efforts pursued by agencies that would otherwise face defunding and furloughs are insulated during a shutdown.

A little bad news for Republicans hopping on the Cruz choo-choo train:

A solid majority of Americans oppose defunding the new health care law if it means shutting down the government and defaulting on debt... Opposition to defunding increases sharply when the issue of shutting down the government and defaulting is included. In that case, Americans oppose defunding 59 percent to 19 percent, with 18 percent of respondents unsure.

...[A] 54 percent majority of Republicans who also identify themselves as Tea Party supporters want the new health care law defunded even if it means a government shutdown-- the only demographic measured in the poll with such a majority.

Republicans who do not identify themselves as Tea Party supporters hold views closer to those of Democrats than to Republicans that do identify themselves as Tea Party supporters: They oppose defunding Obamacare 44 percent to 36 percent with 20 percent unsure.

Independents are more troubled by the prospect of defunding Obamacare and shutting down the government than the broader population. In general, they oppose defunding by a slight plurality of 44 percent to 40 percent. However, when the issue of shutting down the government is included, opposition to the measure swells to 65 percent, while support drops to just 14 percent.