Senator Ted Cruz and Progressive Republicans

TEA Party Tribune reports:

At an April meeting with Tea Party supporters, [Texas Senator Ted] Cruz made some insightful comments. After he, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Tenn.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) threatened to filibuster Obama’s anti-Second Amendment Senate bill, Cruz recalled meetings with fellow 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 told supporters, “And they said: ‘Why did you do this? As a result of what you did, when I go home, my constituents are yelling at me that I’ve got to stand on principle.’ I’m not making that up, said Cruz.

“Listen, before you did this, the politics of it (Obama’s gun-control bill) were great,” a member of the Senate Republican Conference told Cruz, “The Democrats were the bad guys. The Republicans were the good guys. Now we all look like a bunch of squishes.” Cruz had a quick rejoinder for his establishment Republican friends, “Well, there is an alternative. You could just not be a bunch of squishes.”

At the recent meeting of the National Rifle Association in Houston, Texas, Cruz said, “The Constitution matters. All of the Constitution. It’s not pick and choose, it’s not take the parts you like and get rid of the parts you don’t like … Every word of the Constitution matters. It is the fundamental protection of our liberties against the government. Thomas Jefferson described the Constitution as ‘chains’ that bind the mischief of government. And the framers of our Constitution describe the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms as the palladium of our liberties. The Constitution matters and it should be everybody – every elected official, Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal – should be unified in defending the Bill of Rights and the Constitution of our country.”