On Fox News Channel’s “The O’Reilly Factor” on Monday, Karl Rove attempted to lay out why Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz has so many detractors within his own caucus on Capitol Hill.
According to the former Bush deputy chief of staff, Cruz has been making up his strategy as he goes along.
“Well, this strategy of defunding Obamacare was an ad hoc strategy laid out without consulting with his fellow senators and at every step of the way, it’s been sort of cobbled together on the fly,” Rove said. “For example, the House of Representatives voted to defund Obamacare and Sen. Cruz response was to say, ‘That a way to go. I can’t get it through the Senate, so I’m hoping that … the House Republicans will stand strong and continue to call for defunding Obamacare.’ This upset the House Republicans. His response was to say, ‘OK now, I’m going to filibuster it when it comes to the Senate.’ And then it was pointed out that if he filibustered it he would be filibustering the bill that the House passed, that he wouldn’t be filibustering a bill that the Democrats supported. He would be filibustering a bill the Republicans supported.”
The Crossroads GPS founder said his colleagues in the Senate have accused him of keeping them in the dark and have relied on his media appearances to determine what his next move is.
“His fellow senators don’t know where he is coming from,” Rove said. “Sunday morning sitting in the green room waiting for ‘Fox News Sunday’ to begin, I get a call from a senator whom I don’t know too well who said to me ‘Do you know what he is going to say? Because I don’t. I’m a senator and I have no idea what his end game is. I’m going to be watching this in order to figure out what he thinks we should do next.’”
According to Rove, Cruz hasn’t participated in the Thursday morning meetings held by Senate Republicans to lay out his plans for the week, thus not convincing many of his colleagues to support his tactics.
“He should not be surprised — we should not be surprised if their response is ‘We are not going to be dictated to by somebody who doesn’t bother to tell us what he is going to do until after he has made up his mind,’” Rove said.