Shooting the moon

This article on the junior senator from Texas got me thinking.

Specifically, this quote, from Cruz himself:

“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.”

Paired with this observation from a GOP aide:

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!”

I remember playing a game of Hearts1 on an airplane ride once. One of the players was an idiot. One of the players was really good: every hand, no matter what he had, he’d try to shoot the moon. Just to stop him, I had to draw a few points myself, and I always wound up losing.

Ted Cruz is shooting the moon.


  1. Hearts is a card game where you deal out all the cards to the players; players each throw down one card, and the high card takes the “trick.” Then you repeat. Hearts are worth one point each, and the queen of spades is worth 13. The goal is to get the lowest score, but drawing in all the points in the deck is called “shooting the moon”: the person who does this successfully gets 0 points, and everyone else is set with 26 points. 

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