With a little help from his friends, Senators Mike Lee and Marco Rubio, Texas blowhard Ted Cruz kept his fauxlibuster going through Tuesday night and into Wednesday morning, when it will eventually end because of Senate rules. While Cruz may have passed the length of Rand Paul’s real filibuster from earlier this year, it’s important to remember that Cruz is not actually preventing, or even delaying, a vote. As the New York Times editorial board put it in today’s “The Embarrassment of Senator Ted Cruz,” he “may love the spotlight, but, when it fades, he will find he was only speaking to himself.”
It’s been more than 18 hours.
Overnight, Cruz read tweets and letters from supporters, mentioned a random array of popular culture, and did not use the bathroom. He also gave a special shout-out to his kids, who will grow up one day to wonder what, exactly, their dad was hoping to accomplish.
Take a moment to enjoy the sweet photo above of Cruz’s two little girls watching their father on TV, because the context will provoke extreme eye-rolling. About six hours into his ordeal, Cruz read two bedtime stories to his daughters Caroline and Catherine, who were watching him on C-SPAN at home in Texas. Following some Bible passages, he read Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham in its entirety.
“Green Eggs and Ham has some applicability, as curious as it may sound to the Obamcare debate,” he explained afterward for the benefit of those who didn’t attend Harvard. Americans “did not like green eggs and ham, and they did not like Obamacare either. They did not like Obamacare in a box, with a fox, in a house, with a mouse.” Or, like the book’s narrator, in a few weeks Cruz is going to be hanging out of a car screaming about how much he loves the individual mandate.
Here’s Cruz’s dramatic reading in full:
This post has been updated throughout.
