Stridently conservative Texas Sen. Ted Cruz didn’t leave readers of his new book, "A Time for Truth," wondering how he feels about some of his GOP colleagues.
"If transcripts of our Senate lunches were released to the public, I think many voters would be astonished," writes the Republican presidential candidate,
according to the New York Daily News.
Over the course of 342 pages, Cruz offers a peek into the rough-and-tumble world of politics and the hypocrisy he says he has both witnessed and been victimized by.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, he says, duped him into taking a senior position on the National Republican Senatorial Committee by promising he’d stay out of primary battles. Cruz writes that he quit raising money for the GOP when he realized the group was backing GOP incumbents against tea party challengers.
Fellow tea party Republican, Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul, followed McConnell’s lead in an attempt to "undermine" Cruz’s battle to defund Obamacare, a fight that led to the 2013 government shutdown, according to Cruz,
Politico reports.
"During my time in the Senate, I’ve been amazed how many senators pose one way in public — as fiscal conservatives or staunch tea party supporters — and then in private do little or nothing to advance those principles," writes Cruz in his "personal and pointed" observations.
Cruz characterizes as "chicanery" posturing by McConnell and others in the upper chamber for "publicly opposing an increase in the borrowing limit while privately trying to let the debt ceiling increase in 2014 without their fingerprints," according to the website. "When he told a California GOP donor in 2014 about the debt ceiling dispute, Cruz recalls the donor saying repeatedly: ‘The bastards.’"
And he recalls Karl Rove, a senior adviser to President George W. Bush, coming after him in 2009 after Cruz promoted an endorsement he received from President George H.W. Bush in Cruz’s bid for Texas attorney general. Rove purportedly wanted Cruz to "downplay" it.
"What in the hell do you think you're doing?" asked Rove in a phone call, according to Cruz.
"Rove said Bush senior ‘was too old to have good judgment,’" the Daily News reports.