Front Row at Michael Bennet’s Senate-Floor Dismantling of Ted Cruz

It’s Thursday at 11:02 am and Mitch McConnell can’t stop clearing his throat. “Later today,” he’s trying to say from the Senate floor. Instead he pauses. Coughs once. Twice. A third time. He brings a fist to his mouth. “Day 34…” he intones. His voice is brittle and wet. He seems to be stuck in the act of swallowing, the skin at his throat jugging rapidly, like a bird’s, as if with a single animal gesture he’s hoping to both consume and cough up whatever it is that’s catching his tongue.

Or at least that’s how it appears to me, up in the public gallery, where the halls and high ceiling serve to amplify every one of McConnell’s mic’d-up moves. This is my first ever visit to the United States Capitol, despite the fact that I’ve lived in the Washington, DC metro area for nearly a decade; he’s down there on the floor about 60 feet away—gurgling like a man who’s desperate to expel, from depths only he can comprehend, the crown of an enormous, miraculous, somehow-swallowed-whole egg.

In truth it’s astonishing; we’re in the fifth week of the government shutdown and one of the few people with the power to make the nightmare go away can barely bring himself to mention how long it’s lasted.

I can’t help but laugh. In the next moment McConnell finally begins to speak clearly, and even though the whole throat-clearing ordeal takes, in retrospect, a few seconds—viewed on CSPAN, without the gallery’s profile view and booming acoustics, it comes off as innocuously as a sneeze—I’ll spend the rest of the day coming back to the same bewildering image: stacks upon stacks of regurgitated eggs, each one as large as a pear.

To clarify: laughter of any sort is not permitted in the public gallery. Neither is writing or reading or standing or sleeping or talking “or any other type of demonstration either by sound or sign.” I’ve already been admonished for taking out a pen. Instead, as the congressional leaders slowly fill into the chamber—as minority leader Chuck Schumer counters McConnell’s speech with one of his own—I’ve taken to drawing, with my fingernail, short phrases along the inside flap of the only reading material we’re allowed: a soft, glossy 16-page pamphlet titled United States Senate.

The votes this afternoon will address separately amended iterations of H.R. 268, the funding bill needed to reopen the government. Basically, the Republican version includes money for Donald Trump’s increasingly Kafkaesque barrier, while the Democratic one provides for border security but not, as the president likes to call it, “Wall.” In the meantime specific members are doing their best to garner attention. There’s a speech about unpaid air-traffic controllers, followed by a contentious debate regarding the unfunded Coast Guard.

All the while senators from both parties are making their first appearances; briefly, in the run-up to the usual break for lunchtime meetings, the doors to the left and right of the chamber are pulled open, and through them one mildly recognizable American figure after another saunters in. As they do so the chatter down on the floor naturally rises. It’s the same with the gallery. I’m sitting above the Democratic side, and in the row behind me three women who’ve arrived together—on vacation from the Midwest—begin talking earnestly, the first in our section to openly do so. They’re pointing out to each other the identities of the lawmakers.

“Who’s that in the shawl?” one of the them says.

“Murkowski?” her friend responds. “She has young hair!”

One of them gasps. “Mike Pence just got here…” At first it’s difficult to spot the vice president—he is much shorter in person (especially when you consider the foreshortened perspective of an elevated gallery)—but as one of the friends behind me explains: “Not gray hair. No not that one. Not him either. He’s the one with the white hair. Like, bright white.” And suddenly I see him too, Donald Trump’s running mate, a man once described by John Oliver as “a rice cooker covered in homophobic slogans which is currently being held by a chimpanzee that could bite your face off.”

But it’s the appearance of the senior senator from Arizona, Kyrsten Sinema, that causes the biggest stir: “There! See her? You know she’s the first bisexual member of congress. In either branches.”

Someone else says: “Her boots!” Sinema, a former law professor and criminal defense attorney, is wearing what appears to be sheepskin footwear of the thigh-high variety.

Now Elizabeth Warren is arriving. Dianne Feinstein. Lindsey Graham. When the doors open for Kamala Harris she’s hit with light from the hallway beyond; the press photographers have been waiting with their flashes. When Bernie Sanders crosses the floor he looks up to the gallery, at us, and waves sheepishly. “He always waves,” someone a few rows back says. When Mitt Romney shows up—he’s wearing a sharkskin suit, as jaunty and loose as that of a 1920s bootlegger—he immediately approaches a person I can’t identify and then proceeds, without hesitation, to give a vigorous shoulder rub.

It’s 2pm—we’ve all been sitting for hours in our gallery seats, afraid to leave (the bathrooms are located outside the security perimeter)—and now for each new senator that enters it’s as if two or three more exit; a lunchtime schedule of meetings dominate the next hour.

And it’s at this moment that I notice Ted Cruz for the first time; he’s attaching a mic to his lapel. The argument about the funding for the Coast Guard has continued to escalate, and he’s eager to jump in.

When he finally speaks the chamber has pretty much emptied out. So has the gallery. I’m in my same seat. “The Coast Guard is not being paid even as they risk their lives,” he says. He mentions hurricanes and first responders. He says that Democrats are the party of open borders. He points his finger across the empty aisle and blames the opposition: “We’re in a shutdown today because they’re unable to fund 234 miles of border wall.” He goes so far as to directly address members of the Armed Services: “Thank you for your heroism. Thank you for the amazing difference you make.” He’s recently grown a beard, graying at his jaw. His suit is at least two shades lighter than Mitt Romney’s. “We can keep fighting back and forth about whether securing the border or having an open border is a good idea, but this ought to be an issue that is real simple…”

Just as I’m about to take a break from the chamber I hear someone new speaking. But I can’t see them; they’re standing directly beneath me, the emotion in their voice rising precipitously. So I crane forward.

It’s the Democratic senator for Colorado, Michael Bennet. I don’t fully take in his initial remarks—“I seldom rise on this floor to contradict somebody on the other side,” he says, his arms crossed tensely. He’s 54 years old. Before joining the Senate in 2009, he’d been the Denver Public Schools superintendent. His voice resonates even when he speaks softly, a trick of the cavernous chamber’s speakers. “These crocodile tears that the senator from Texas is crying for first responders are too hard for me to take.” He points his right finger. “Because when the senator from Texas shut the government down in 2013, my state was flooded.” This last word hits like the crack of a snare drum. “People were killed!” People’s houses were destroyed! Their small businesses were ruined! Forever!”

But Bennet is just getting started. All I can say is that, in retrospect, he makes Mitch McConnell’s opening gurgles and barks sound, in comparison, like nothing so much as patter. “How ludicrous it is,” he shouts at Cruz, “that this government is shut down over a promise the president of the United States couldn’t keep!” He puts his hands in his pockets and pulls them out again. “The idea that he was going to build a medieval wall across the southern border of Texas, take it from the farmers and ranchers that were there and have the Mexicans pay for it, isn’t true!”

Ted Cruz is, by nearly every valuable metric, terrible. Especially in what we might call the “Nixonian” mold: a plastic bag empty enough to float its formless shape across anything it deems worthy of suffocation.

Off to my left, the press gallery is beginning to fill up (as a friend once told me: “Nothing attracts a Politico reporter like shouting.”) Their movement catches my eye—like birds they lean together, instinctually—but as Bennet continues I can’t help but fix my glance on the senator from Texas, who’s smirking enormously.

The last time I heard Ted Cruz speak in person was at the Republican National Convention in 2016; he said something supercilious about voting your “conscience” and suddenly, in the pit of the arena, thousands of people began hissing at him. One of the vilest sounds I’ve ever heard. I’ll never forget how Ted responded—he just stood there, nodding. From my notes on that night:

–Ted Cruz is what we’ll all look like when global warming melts off our faces.
–Cruz eats shit.

Don’t get me wrong: Cruz has always been an easy a target. Still: to watch him smirk endlessly as Michael Bennet dismantles him—“We shouldn’t shut the government down, as it has been in this case, for a campaign promise that the president, I’m sure, knew he couldn’t keep”—is to sense, at least on a personal level, the near bottomless indictment that a word like complicity, when used correctly, suggests.

To be more specific: Ted Cruz is, by nearly every valuable metric, terrible. Especially in what we might call the “Nixonian” mold: a plastic bag empty enough to float its formless shape across anything it deems worthy of suffocation.

But is it ever possible to take responsibility and learn from wrongdoing if the only narrative you believe in is that you are the narrative? In other words, how does someone like Ted Cruz end up wearing the sort of mask he’s spent so much of his life growing his face to fit?

“In all my time in the Senate,” Cruz said afterward to Michael Bennet, “I don’t believe I have ever bellowed or yelled at a colleague on the Senate floor and I hope never to do that.”

*

Suddenly it’s 3pm. The afternoon, cold and wet and sickeningly breezy—Washingtonian—is nearly gone. Time to vote. The senators are returning. Once again the public gallery is full. Chuck Schumer takes to the floor and repeats, nearly word for word, his speech from earlier in the morning. Then he works the floor. By now, prominent Democratic members of the House of Representatives have made their way to the Senate chamber, standing against the back wall as the pivotal votes take place, and from my seat in the gallery I watch as Schumer glad-hands with all of them.

To Maxine Waters, the 80-year-old congresswoman from California, he asks playfully, “Can I kiss your ring?” To someone I don’t recognize, he exclaims in his best pig Latin: “Ixne on the Exne!” On the other side of the aisle it’s the same. Lindsey Graham is gesturing emphatically at Lisa Murkowski—whether in jest or out of genuine despair I can’t tell. Mitt Romney has returned, voting against Donald Trump’s bill with an emphatic thumb down, not that it matters; both resolutions will fail; and the government, for yet another day, will remain closed. I also catch a glance of Tom Cotton, the tall, awkward, long-necked senator from Arkansas who looks as if, at this particular moment in his life, he wants nothing more than to be holding a bag of boiled eggs he might slide down his throat, one after another, at a pace only he has the authority to determine.

And this is what I’m struggling to scratch with my fingernail in my copy of The United States Senate—COTTON = EGG SUCKING DOG—when, on the floor beneath where I’m sitting, someone I recognize appears: It’s John R. Lewis, the 78-year-old civil rights hero who represents Georgia’s 5th district. Chuck Schumer is on him immediately, smiling, shaking hands. But with an unrelenting expression Lewis watches Schumer and everyone else. With the Democratic victory last November he’s become the new chair of the Ways and Means committee, in position to spearhead the investigation into our current president’s illegalities.

Which brings us back to another moment from earlier in the day. Michael Bennet, halfway through his vigorous indictment of Ted Cruz, found himself employing an age-old rhetorical trick known as paralipsis—a favorite of Roman senators like Cicero: in regards to Cruz’s and Trump’s publicly shaky relationship, Bennet exclaimed, “I was going to talk about what [Trump] said about the junior senator’s father… But I’m going to leave that alone.”

Right then my eyes happened to be fixed on Ted Cruz’s face. It was the only moment, over the course of the afternoon, that the smirk he wears so defiantly felt like something more than a mask.

After all, if you’re Donald Trump and the fate of your rampantly corrupt presidency comes down to a vote of confidence in the upper chamber to avoid an impeachment conviction—if this whole time you’ve been counting on a shit-eater of Ted Cruz’s extraordinary caliber to bail you out—then it’s fair to say that you are fucked. The members of the US Senate have never been in the business of saving anyone except, on very few occasions, themselves. But then:

What did you think this was?