Is attacking other Republicans just as beneficial as attacking Democrats?

     Donald Trump has vaulted to the top of Republican Primary polls. During the first several months of his campaign he has managed to insult just about every large group around. Most surprising though, are the relentless attacks he has leveled on fellow Republicans.  

He’s given out Senator Lindsey Graham’s phone number. He’s said that Senator John McCain was a war hero only because he got captured and became a prisoner of war. He’s called Jeb Bush weak on immigration and education. And yet, not only do his poll numbers not fall, they continue to rise. A fact that seems not to have been lost on Senator Ted Cruz.

Cruz is a vocal opponent of the Export-Import Bank. The Ex-Im Bank, as it is referred to, was created in 1934 as a way to spur business growth between US companies and foreign customers. It provides loans to foreign buyers of US products and provides loan guarantees to US exporters. In recent years it has become quite controversial in US politics, especially among Republicans. Establishment Republicans see it as an important pro-business entity that supports corporations. They are quick to cite the fact that it supports up to 200,000 American jobs.

Harder-line conservatives, such as Cruz, see it as just another form of corporate welfare. A government body that interjects itself into the free market and picks winners and losers. They note, for example, that roughly 83% of the loan guarantees the Ex-Im Bank made in 2012 went to one company, the aerospace manufacturer Boeing. The bank is often referred to as “Boeing’s bank.”

In May of this year it became clear that amidst the Republican squabbling over the bank, funding for the Bank’s charter would be allowed to expire for the first time in 80 years. Right around the same time, President Obama’s Trade Promotion Authority (TPA) bill, a bill that would allow the fast-tracking through Congress of international trade deals negotiated by the administration, hit a snag. At the last moment the TPA bill won the support of three pivotal Senators: Patty Murray (D-WA), Maria Cantwell (D-WA) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC). (Worth noting here is that Boeing has significant operations in both the states of Washington and South Carolina.)   

At that time Ted Cruz reportedly asked Senate Majority Leader, Republican Mitch McConnell, whether a deal was cut with Senators Murray, Cantwell and Graham for their change in support and if so, what the deal was. According to Cruz, McConnell swore that no deal had been cut, not on the Ex-Im Bank or on anything else.

So, in late July, when on the cusp of the Senate’s summer recess, McConnell filed a procedural motion to bring a vote to re-authorize the Ex-Im bank to the floor of the Senate it became clear something was amiss. Ted Cruz took to the Senate floor and in a blistering speech, unusual in both content and tone, railed against the Majority Leader and accused him of telling “a flat-out lie.”

The speech was unusual not just for its violation of Senate decorum (rarely, if ever, do Senators take to the floor to call each other liars, and there is actually a rule against Senators using words that “…impute to another senator or to other senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a senator…”), but also for the target of the fiery rhetoric: a fellow Republican. And a party leader at that.

Conventional wisdom says Cruz is cleverly positioning himself as a supporter and follower of Trump’s strategy so as to inherit his supporters if/when Trump drops out of the race. To be clear this is not a novel approach. Every candidate expects to win and therefore expects to inherit supporters from other candidates if/when they drop out of the race. What is novel here is the brazenness with which Cruz chose to attack the Republican Majority Leader.

The headline of this episode is not that the Ex-Im Bank got re-authorized. It’s not that Mitch McConnell may have lied to Ted Cruz. It’s not even that Ted Cruz called Mitch McConnell a liar on the Senate floor. The real news here is the calculation that Ted Cruz is making. The bet that running hard against fellow Republicans will prove just as fruitful as running hard against Democrats. It seems that Trump has authored a blueprint on how to vault to the top of the polls in the Republican Party primaries that other Republicans are proving all too eager to follow.