 | | Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The New York Times |
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Senator Ted Cruz was never on anybody's shortlist for the Most Empathetic Politician award. But his latest display startled even the most jaded political hands. |
With Cruz's home state, Texas, buffeted by a snowstorm that has caused widespread power failures and claimed dozens of lives nationwide, Cruz got on a plane last night and flew to Cancún, Mexico, for a family vacation. Photos began circulating on social media this morning, accompanied by a chorus of dismay and ridicule. |
Early this afternoon he released a statement saying that his kids had wanted to take a vacation and arguing that he was still able to work from abroad. "Wanting to be a good dad, I flew down with them last night and am flying back this afternoon," he said, adding that he planned to come home today. |
I called up a few crisis-communications pros who have worked with other embattled politicians to get their take on the Cruz fiasco. They all sang some variation on the same theme: just wow. |
"You can pretty much do damage control for anything, and I think he could do damage control for this," said Lis Smith, a Democratic strategist who worked on Pete Buttigieg's presidential campaign last year. Still, she added: "You have to wonder what the hell was he thinking doing this. The optics of this could not be much worse." |
Stu Loeser, the longtime press secretary for former Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York — who often took discreet trips to Bermuda while in office — was also amazed by Cruz's decision to fly the coop at one of his state's most vulnerable moments in recent memory. |
"The hardest part in politics and the hardest part in crisis communications is the same thing: being able to predict the future," Loeser said. "But in this case, people have been without power for days. You knew what would happen." |
Risa Heller, a crisis consultant who advised the disgraced former Representative Anthony Weiner, said that even in a fast-moving, 24-hour news cycle, Cruz's decision to go through with his vacation could be hard to live down. "It will stay with him for a long time," she said. "Folks in Texas are not going to forget that a guy who they elected to look out for their interests went on a vacation at their darkest time." |
She added: "Sometimes someone goes out of town and something crazy happens and they have to come back. You can say, 'I understand that.' But this is not that. This storm happened and then he left. It sends a real message to his constituents. I guess time will tell if they'll forgive him, but it's pretty unforgivable." |
The Republican strategist Joel Sawyer helped former Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina weather the 2009 scandal over his secret vacations with a paramour, which nearly ended his political career. (He ultimately completed his term as governor and later regained his old seat in the House.) Sawyer said that after Sanford left the governor's mansion, he worked to restore his reputation by offering contrition. |
Sawyer wasn't so sure Cruz had it in him to do the same. "Yes, he can do damage control, but it's going require great humility on his part," he said. "I'm not sure how much of that Ted Cruz can muster." |
What's more probable, he said, is that Cruz will strike a defiant tone and criticize his critics. The unapologetic statement Cruz's office released this afternoon certainly seemed to point in that direction. |
"More likely, he's going to flip it around and turn it into an attack on the media," Sawyer said. "'I'm just trying to go somewhere with my family, and these liberals in the media are coming at me.' If there were a formula for Republican fund-raising, that's it in a nutshell." |
 | | Senator Ted Cruz spoke to reporters in the airport in Cancún, Mexico.Reuters |
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Biden's allies roll out his immigration plan. |
President Biden's allies on Capitol Hill formally introduced his immigration overhaul in the House on Thursday morning, making good on his campaign promise to seek to modernize the nation's immigration system and provide a path to citizenship for millions of undocumented residents. |
"We're here today because last November 80 million Americans voted against Donald Trump and against everything he stood for," Senator Bob Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, said at a virtual news conference. "They voted to restore common sense, compassion and competence in our government. And part of that mandate is fixing our immigration system, which is a cornerstone of Trump's hateful horror show." |
The unveiling puts a spotlight on a high-profile and thorny political issue that Biden is hoping to address, despite the steep political challenges associated with moving immigration legislation in Congress. |
It comes at a time when the president and Democratic lawmakers are already in the midst of another major legislative undertaking: passing another coronavirus relief package. A planned trip by Biden to visit a Pfizer vaccine manufacturing facility in Michigan on Thursday was postponed until Friday because of a winter storm in the Washington area. |
Though Biden's $1.9 trillion relief plan is all but certain to command attention on Capitol Hill in the near term, the introduction of the immigration overhaul provides a reminder that a number of daunting issues unrelated to the pandemic lie ahead as well. |
Menendez and Representative Linda Sánchez, Democrat of California, unveiled the immigration legislation, which will be called the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021 and is based on a proposal Biden announced on his first day in office. The two lawmakers were joined by 10 of their colleagues for the announcement. |
The centerpiece of the legislation is an eight-year path to citizenship for most of the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States as of Jan. 1. After passing background checks and paying taxes, they would be allowed to live and work in the United States for five years. After that, they could apply for a green card, giving them permanent status in the United States and the opportunity to win citizenship after three more years. |
But the bill tries to make the most far-reaching changes in immigration law in more than three decades. It would sweep away restrictions on family-based immigration, making it easier for spouses and children to join their families already in the country. And it would expand worker visas to allow more foreigners to come to the United States for jobs. |
Unlike previous efforts to overhaul immigration, the legislation does not include a large focus on increased border enforcement. Instead, the bill adds resources to process migrants legally at ports of entry and invests $4 billion over four years in distressed economies in the hopes of preventing people from fleeing to the United States because of security and economic crises. |
Menendez acknowledged that it would be difficult to win the support of the 10 Republican senators needed to pass Biden's legislation. The Senate is split 50-50, and Democrats will need 60 votes to overcome a filibuster. |
But Menendez rejected arguments by some immigration advocates that Congress should pursue more targeted bills that provide citizenship to smaller, more discrete groups of undocumented people. |
"We will never win an argument that we don't have the courage to make," he said. "We will do the righteous thing and make our case for both inclusive and lasting immigration reform. And we have seen in poll after poll, the vast majority of Americans are standing with us." |
This piece comes from our live briefing, where you can find more updates on today's developments in Washington. |
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