More Notes on the Cruz Speech

First, on "fillibuster." As Josh Huder pointed out on twitter, there certainly is a filibuster involved here. That's correct, but the filibuster is, essentially, the objection to the motion to proceed, which forces a cloture vote and sets the clock for the cloture vote. That's the filibuster. By all accounts, the filibuster will be defeated at that point. Cruz's speech is occupying a (very large!) portion of the time within that filibuster; if he wasn't speaking, either someone else would be or the Senate would be in recess. So there is a filibuster -- which Cruz and Mike Lee are responsible for -- but this speech itself isn't delaying or obstructing anything.

Given all that, I'm pretty much fine with calling it a filibuster or not. On twitter, I went with "fauxlibuster" (was I first on that? I went with it right at the start, but I might have seen someone else use it).

Second: while it's fair to talk about the speech in the context of GOP WH 2016 (Chuck Todd called it "the world's longest presidential stump speech"), that overlooks the specific point of this specific tactic for him right now. As far as I can see, this is all about his slip last week in which he admitted, after the House vote, that defunding would lose in the Senate and that therefore the key to the strategy would be the House sticking to its position after that -- which was interpreted by frustrated House Republicans as defeatism. More than anything, this speech is his response to that -- even if it is entirely useless from a parliamentary point of view, it's going to be impossible for Republicans to complain that Cruz didn't fight hard.

Third: On the other hand -- it sure will be interesting to see whether Republicans yield back postcloture time, or otherwise fail to use their maximum available delays later in the week. Not that it really matters; this isn't the kind of fight in which adding a few days of delay actually makes any real difference. But it will be interesting, nevertheless.

Next: it's worth emphasizing, as some others have, that this stunt is in fact very different from recent similar stunts by Bernie Sanders and Rand Paul. In both of those cases, the point of the extended speech was to raise the visibility of an issue. That's certainly not the case with health care reform! Neither the issue in general, nor Cruz's views on the issue, have been marginalized in the press. And as Ezra Klein pointed out this morning, Cruz hasn't exactly been focused on the evils of Obamacare; he's spent more time, really, on bashing "Washington" (and to a large extent Republican Senators) for supposedly not listening to the will of the people.

All in all, as silly politician stunts go, this is one of the least useful and impressive. It's far more focused on Ted Cruz, personally. There's no other particular point to it. I am, in general, in favor of silly politician stunts (and I suppose this one can very much be justified on representation grounds; Ted Cruz promised the voters who put him there that he would be a blowhard, and look!). But it's a lot easier to mock this one than to get up much enthusiasm for it.