Watch this Senate Democrat lose his cool with Ted Cruz over shutdown ‘crocodile tears’
Colorado’s Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet is hardly known for emotional outbursts — but in a speech on Thursday responding to Texas Republican Ted Cruz, Bennet began yelling and said Cruz’s shutdown rhetoric was “too hard for me to take.”
“I’ve worked very hard over the years to work in a bipartisan way … with my Republican colleagues, but these crocodile tears that the senator from Texas is crying for first responders are too hard for me to take,” Bennet said after Cruz finished a speech of his own.
Then Bennet explained why he felt so strongly.
“When the senator from Texas shut this government down in 2013 my state was flooded,” Bennet said. “It was underwater. People were killed. People’s houses were destroyed. Their small businesses were ruined forever. And because of the senator from Texas, this government was shut down, for politics.”
Back in 2013, Cruz’s attempt to defund President Obama’s health care law, the Affordable Care Act, shut down government for more than two weeks, as McClatchy has reported. Cruz took to the Senate floor for 21 hours during that shutdown to condemn Obamacare — giving the fourth-longest U.S. Senate speech ever, though at times he resorted to reading passages from the Dr. Seuss children’s book “Green Eggs and Ham” to keep his oratory going.
Meanwhile, heavy rains in Colorado had flooded an area of the state as big as Connecticut, killing at least eight, destroying about 2,000 homes and damaging 16,000 more, the Los Angeles Times reported in October 2013. The shutdown that coincided with flood recovery “left Colorado officials scrambling to keep emergency relief and recovery operations continuing in the wake of last month’s massive flooding,” according to the newspaper.
Moments before Bennet took the floor, Cruz had been blaming Democrats for the current and ongoing shutdown, which is now the longest in United States history.
“They voted for 350 miles of wall, so why are they shutting the government down over 234 miles of wall?” Cruz asked, suggesting Democrats forced the shutdown because they “hate” the president. “It’s not substantive, it’s political.”
The partial shutdown began in December, when President Trump refused to sign legislation to fund large parts of the federal government unless it included $5.7 billion for a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border — a signature promise from his 2016 campaign, and a non-starter for many Democrats, who are now in control of the U.S. House of Representatives. The shutdown has left roughly 800,000 federal employees either off the job or working without pay if they are deemed “essential,” like TSA agents at airports and the Coast Guard.
Bennet — who at times during the speech raised his arms as well as his voice — called the situation “ludicrous,” blaming Cruz and other Republicans.
“Now it’s his business, not my business, why he supports a president who wants to erect a medieval barrier on the border of Texas,” Bennet said of Cruz in his speech. “... This government is shut down over a promise that the president of the United States couldn’t keep, and that America is not interested in having him keep.”
Politico described Bennet as “normally a reserved and low-key senator.” But according to the Washington Post, Bennet (who’s a “backbencher,” in the newspaper’s estimation) has said he harbors presidential ambitions.
“Dressing down Cruz on C-SPAN is a surefire way to gain fans in the Democratic base,” Colby Itkowitz wrote for the Post.
Once Bennet was done speaking, Cruz accused him of spending “a great deal of time yelling,” according to Yahoo News.
“I will say in all of my time in the Senate, I don’t believe I have ever bellowed or yelled at a colleague on the Senate floor and I hope I never do that,” Cruz said, according to The Hill.