"He went out of his way to attack New York on the bill,” King, R-N.Y., added, the New York Daily News reports. "It's a little early to forgive and forget."

“It’s life and death,” King continued. “There were really false and phony charges made against the Sandy aid, and if Ted Cruz had prevailed, my constituents would be homeless."

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I batted 1.000 for that cycle, but it was easy. In 2016, Republicans won’t be facing a Democratic incumbent, so somebody has a shot. I recently wrote that New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie will never be president, due to his out-of-control anger issues, but candidly, I think that’s my riskiest one yet.

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The New York Times charitably says that "Friday’s speech was not the first time Mr. Cruz may have acted counter to some of the Senate’s norms," before bringing up Cruz's decidedly McCarthyite take on Chuck Hagel.

Cruz is at the FreedomWorks Texas Summit, and the news here is that he calls most of his colleagues "squishes" and gives a (quite self-aggrandizing) account of off-the-record Senate Republican caucus luncheons, which apparently involved a lot of people yelling at Cruz and Rand Paul and the other guy who also promised to filibuster the entire gun deal from start to finish. In this version of events, the three filibustering amigos were responsible for the failure of the entire proposal. As Dave Weigel points out, that's not really how it happened. The bill failed -- and was probably doomed to begin with -- because a lot more than three senators opposed it, and the Cruz/Paul filibuster threat was worse politics for the party than allowing debate to proceed and then watching red-state Democrats cave. Which is what actually happened.

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Cruz had popped by a FreedomWorks meeting in Texas on Friday, and was speaking about a letter he wrote with Sens. Rand Paul, R-Ky., and Mike Lee, R-Utah, announcing their plan to filibuster gun control legislation. The letter, Cruz said, "generated more heat" from other Republicans.“We’ve had probably five or six lunches with a bunch of Republican senators standing up and looking at Rand and Mike and me and yelling at the top of their lungs. I mean really upset,” Cruz said.

"They said, ‘Listen, before you did this, the politics of it were great. The Dems were the bad guys, the Republicans were the good guys. Now we all look like a bunch of squishes.’" Cruz continued. "Well, there is an alternative. You could just not be a bunch of squishes.”

Watch:

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House Majority Leader Eric Cantor agreed. He said on CNBC he didn’t understand “why we just don’t see the White House come forward and do the things that we agree on” such as cutting Social Security, without additional tax increases.

Get it? The Republican leadership is already salivating over the President’s proposed Social Security cut. They’ve been wanting to cut Social Security for years.

But they won’t agree to close tax loopholes for the rich.

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Watch:

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Politico reports:

Though they don’t use the word “filibuster” in the letter, the conservatives are leaving no doubt that they would filibuster on an initial procedural question — the motion to proceed.

Lee staged a test vote on the issue during consideration of the Senate budget last week. He tried to amend a point of order against gun control legislation to the budget but fell short. It needed a three-fifths supermajority and failed 50-49, needing 60 votes to pass. But the final tally emboldened Lee, Paul and Cruz because they were so close to a majority and a filibuster takes just 41 votes to sustain.

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Cruz made drones and civil liberties the cornerstone of the speech, using the issue both to take a stand for something he believes in and to hammer President Obama. It played such a prominent role in his speech that one has to wonder if Paul, who won the straw poll just moments earlier, would resent Cruz's attempt to steal a bit of his thunder.

Cruz also relished the opportunity to take a shot at Sen. John McCain, who sharply criticized Paul and Cruz's filibuster, calling them "wacko birds." “If standing for liberty and standing for the Constitution means you’re a wacko bird, then count me a proud wacko bird. I think there are more than a few other wacko birds gathered here today," he said to cheers.

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“What I find sad about Sen. McCain’s recent comments both to Ted Cruz, when Ted Cruz was frankly raising legitimate questions [about Benghazi] and with Rand Paul, is, you know, when I first knew John McCain in the House — he was a maverick. In the Senate, for years, he was a maverick,” Gingrich said on Fox News on Thursday.

He added: "But I think frankly it doesn’t hurt Ted Cruz and it doesn’t hurt Rand Paul — it hurts John McCain. The country is moving on, we’re in a new era, people know that these are legitimate questions.”

McCain had criticized Paul's filibuster, quoting from an earlier Wall Street Journal Op-Ed and calling the Kentucky Republican's filibuster a "stunt" to "fire up impressionable libertarian kids in their college dorms." McCain also called some of Paul's claims "simply false."'

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The wonderful Jane Mayer recounts an Americans for Prosperity rally she covered in Texas two and half years ago, at which now-Texas Senator Ted Cruz “accused the Harvard Law School of harboring a dozen Communists on its faculty when he studied there” in the early 1990s. The revelation of these baseless, McCarthy-esque accusations sheds light on the origins of Cruz’s baseless, McCarthy-esque questioning of Secretary of Defense nominee Chuck Hagel. (The best part of Mayer’s piece is the bewilderment of Charles Fried, a Republican who served in the Reagan administration and later taught Cruz at Harvard, who diplomatically told Mayer that Cruz’s statement “lacks nuance.”)

Mayer adds:

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According to Jane Mayer in the New Yorker, Senator Ted Cruz claims that when he studied at Harvard Law in the early 1990s, there were “twelve” communists on the faculty who “believed in the overthrow of the U.S. Government.” Cruz has justly been compared to Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy, who exploited the red scare of the early Cold War to go after liberals, until he finally went too far and accused the U.S. army of being a hotbed of pro-Soviet subversion.

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Potential candidates have until Wednesday to collect 10,000 signatures, leaving little hope of expanding the narrow Republican field after a slew of potential candidates have withdrawn or declined to run for the seat vacated by new Secretary of State John Kerry.

“It's hard to find anyone that we can support,” lamented Carlos Hernandez, the state coordinator for Tea Party Patriots.

The biggest setback for Republicans came at the beginning of the month when former Sen. Scott Brown declined to run, dashing the GOP’s best hopes for taking the seat. It wasn’t as bad for Tea Party activists. Even though the conservative movement helped get Brown’s campaign off the ground in 2010, with Tea Party Express alone spending almost $350,000 on his behalf, he’s fallen out of favor for his moderate votes in the Senate.

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So it goes for Cruz, the freshman Texas senator who in his first two months on the job has baselessly asserted that Chuck Hagel might have received money from the North Korean government, reiterated his belief that there were 12 Communists on Harvard Law School’s faculty when he was a student there, and delighted in playing the role of ideological purist, even – or especially – if it puts him at odds with fellow Republicans.

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Through a spokeswoman, Cruz has responded to the story, and stands by the claims he made in his speech. The New Yorker reports:

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Jane Mayer of the New Yorker reported on Cruz's speech, which she attended at the time, and which took place at a conference hosted by the Koch-funded Tea Party group Americans For Prosperity, called “Defending the American Dream."

Cruz, who graduated Harvard Law School in 1995, said in his speech that President Obama is “the most radical” president “ever to occupy the Oval Office," and "would have made a perfect president of Harvard Law School." Why? "There were fewer declared Republicans in the faculty when we were there than Communists! There was one Republican. But there were twelve who would say they were Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government."

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"Washington has a long tradition of trying to hurl insults to silence those who they don't like what they're saying," said Cruz.

Cruz made his comments at a visit to a Texas gun maker that manufactures assault weapons for the civilian market. “He’s our type of guy,” kvelled the firm’s marketing manager. Indeed.

It’s true that critics from Chris Matthews to Sen. Barbara Boxer have heard more than an echo of Joe McCarthy in Cruz’s evidence-free attacks on Hagel. In the New York Times Saturday, Boxer compared Cruz’s dark insinuations against Hagel to the Wisconsin senator’s unsourced tirades against alleged Communists in the 1950s.

"It was really reminiscent of a different time and place, when you said, 'I have here in my pocket a speech you made on such and such a date,' and of course, nothing was in the pocket," Boxer said. "It was reminiscent of some bad times."

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All in a day’s work for the Tea Party movement’s new darling, who's stepped into a newly created void. Jim DeMint, Allen West and Joe Walsh are out. Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin have lost their luster. And Marco Rubio is getting a taste for compromising on immigration. Cruz is only too happy to step up and take their place.

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In a vacuum and without actual evidence, Politico declared that Warren has a "quiet plan" to become a "silent senator" - one who refuses to speak out on controversial issues and therefore creates an image for herself that is "a sharp departure from her rousing campaign and outspoken consumer advocacy." Yet, that very week, Warren showed she will likely be the opposite of a "silent senator." She did this by slamming Republicans obstructing the nomination of a consumer regulator, publicly grilling negligent bank regulators and generally mustering a dominating performance at her very first committee hearing, thus generating national headlines.

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Here's Politico with the shocking details:

Behind closed doors, some Republican senators report that Cruz, in his stone-cold serious prosecutorial style, speaks at length when it’s far more common for freshmen to wait before asserting themselves — particularly ones who were just sworn in.

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Armed with silly props, Cruz hit Hagel with appearances on Al Jazeera in which Hagel appeared to agree with callers who attacked the U.S. or Israel, plus an interview in which he described Israel’s 2006 military campaign against Lebanon as “sickening slaughter.”

Reporters quickly showed that Cruz distorted Hagel’s replies to the Al Jazeera callers, either by leaving out the context of his answers or truncating them.  Slate’s Dave Weigel showed that Cruz also took the “sickening slaughter” quote out of context – he actually attacked “sickening slaughter on both sides,” acknowledging the role of Hezbollah rockets in triggering and then escalating the ugly conflict.

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