Ted Cruz Leads the Twitter Pack in Texas

Ted Cruz remains combustibly in the news again this week — a high-profile speech to Republican faithful in early-primary South Carolina followed up with another tart public spat in the Senate, with Majority Harry Reid likening him to a schoolyard bully.

Four months into his time as the junior Republican senator from Texas, Cruz appears to operating on the principle that no amount of publicity is too much — especially for someone who’s suddenly tilting toward a run for president. His affect will get plenty more media attention starting Thursday, when the Judiciary Committee on which he sits opens debate on the immigration overhaul, probably lasting until Memorial Day. Cruz is going to work to slow or derail the bill at every turn.

All the while, the 42-year-old has been working diligently to cultivate his conservative base on social media, with what looks to be decent success. If he runs for the GOP nomination in 2016, he’ll potentially be doing so with the help of more Twitter followers than anyone else in the field.

Some enlightening detail about this has been assembled in recent days by the Houston Chronicle, the senator’s hometown paper. Its Texas on the Potomac blog made Cruz a test case of an effort to gauge the social media usage of all 38 members of the state’s congressional delegation.

Cruz is averaging 353 new followers every day and he sends out an average of 3.5 tweets daily — Wednesdays being his most prolific days. The favored conservative hashtags #defundobamacare or #2ndamendment are in more than half the posts @SenTedCruz has sent so far. He’s only tweeted 405 times from his Senate account, but those missives have collectively been retweeted almost 105,000 times. (The most recent, about the Benghazi embassy contretemps, went out at breakfast time and had been retweeted almost 4,000 times before noon.)

And get this: 86 percent of Twitter sentiment about the senator has been positive, by the Chronicle’s calculation.

Mom to Jeb: ‘We’ve Had Enough Bushes’ in White House

Barbara Bush is getting ready to hear a sarcastic “Thanks a lot, Mom,” from both of her sons.

The former first lady declared this morning that she doesn’t think Jeb Bush will — or should — run for president in 2016 because “we’ve had enough Bushes.” In doing so, she not only complicated things for her second-born boy, who has signaled that he’s contemplating a bid for the Republican nomination next time, but simultaneously stole some of the warm headlines her first-born was expecting from the dedication of  his presidential library. Full story

Can Rubio Make Immigration a Non-Issue for 2016?

Assuming the Senate “gang of eight” unveils its immigration legislation, as promised, a disproportionate share of this week’s media attention will once again be aimed at a single senator in that octet.

That’s even though this chapter of the Marco Rubio story has hardly changed in recent weeks — certainly not since Sunday, when the Republican from Florida appeared on a record seven network TV news shows. His logistical feat should have ended any mystery about his intentions on immigration: He’s decided, without ambiguity or room for backtracking, to defy the vituperative warnings from fellow conservatives and take the lead for his party on the most comprehensive overhaul of immigration laws since 1986.

Even though the “will he or won’t he?” question has been answered, the coverage will continue to be enormous because of the consequences for the Republican Party’s electoral fortunes — and for Rubio’s own aspirations to become the first Latino in the White House. But the mystery on both those fronts seems to be dissipating as well. Support for creating a multi-requirement pathway to citizenship for the 11 million people who reside in the country illegally stood at a solid 57 percent majority among Republicans in a Gallup Poll released on April 12.

Full story

3 GOP Reasons for Immigration Revamp — in 1 Day!

The dam may be crumbling in front of the reservoir of Republican resistance to an immigration overhaul that allows almost 11 million people now in the country illegally to get on the road toward citizenship.

Three significant cracks have emerged in the past 24 hours, potentially the most important one this morning. Rand Paul, who’s made plain his interest in becoming the tea party’s next presidential candidate, spoke emphatically in favor of that idea in a speech to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. “Prudence, compassion and thrift all point us toward the same goal: bringing these workers out of the shadows and into becoming and being taxpaying members of society,” the Kentucky senator said.

One day earlier, an embrace of “comprehensive immigration reform” — the code phrase for a policy overhaul that includes eventual citizenship for illegals — was the singular legislative policy proposal included in the Republican National Committee’s recommendations for spurring a GOP revival, which was otherwise entirely about campaign tactics, rhetorical shifts and branding.

Also on Monday, a coalition called Evangelical Immigration Table, which includes some the country’s most prominent conservative Christian groups, for the first time explicitly urged Congress to put “clear steps to citizenship” for illegal immigrants in any overhaul package.

Beyond the breadth of support represented by that trio, it’s important to note that they offered somewhat different rationales for their new-found stances. Paul said he was interested in growing the economy, boosting the federal tax base and improving the American work ethic, declaring, “I’ve never met a new immigrant looking for a free lunch.” The RNC conceded that the endorsement was a bow to its horrible standing in the polls with Latinos. “If we do not,” its 100-page report warned, “our party’s appeal will continue to shrink to its core constituencies only.”  And the evangelicals said their embrace was “rooted in our biblically informed commitment to human freedom and dignity.” Full story

Squaring the GOP Autopsy With the Perils of Perez

Plenty of Republicans are itching to start the year’s second big Cabinet confirmation fight over putting Tom Perez in charge of the Labor Department. They’ll be pressed hard to back away from such a confrontation after pondering the autopsy and re-branding report from their national party organization, meaning the second-term Obama Cabinet will have its first Latino member before Memorial Day.

The Republican National Committee’s endorsement of an immigration overhaul today, and its announcement that it will spend $10 million in the coming year on grass-roots outreach to Hispanics and other minority groups, is the party’s most assertively ambitious effort in a couple of decades to change its image after an electoral drubbing. But a big piece of the public relations benefit could be lost at the starting gate if the party’s congressional wing decides to make a big deal out of opposing someone who so clearly looks just like what the GOP says it wants to look more like.

Obama formally announced the Perez nomination today. But it’s been a done deal for the past week, allowing plenty of time for conservative groups and their GOP allies in the Senate to start building their paper trail against him — mainly focused on his past three and a half years as head of the civil rights division at the Justice Department.

Some don’t like his office’s work to stop South Carolina and Texas from setting new voting rules that his team viewed as racially biased. Others don’t like Perez’s several confrontations with Joe Arpaio, the immigration hard-liner Arizona sheriff. Iowa’s Charles E. Grassley, the top Judiciary Committee Republican, is particularly irked that Perez backed away from a lending discrimination lawsuit in Minnesota. And most problematic of all for the nominee, in the eyes of the GOP, is a Justice inspector general’s report released last week that suggests Perez has done too little to combat “deep ideological polarization” in his division’s voting rights office.

But none of those criticisms appears, at least so far, to have the sort of staying power and sound-bit strength to become the basis for a viable GOP filibuster, or even to slow down the scheduling of a confirmation hearing for very long. Full story

Portman’s Spotlight: The New Face of Moderate Republicans

Whether he wants to or not, Rob Portman has just become a leading player in the Republican Party’s socially moderate camp.

He says he’s ambivalent about embracing his new role, but the moment looks right for him on two fronts: There’s an unexpected opening in his schedule, and the party needs all the help it can get from its elder statesmen in catching up to the people it would presume to lead.

On Friday Portman became the first current GOP senator to take the liberal side in one of the defining social issues of our time, declaring he was converting to an embrace of same-sex marriage because one of his sons told him he is gay. In doing so, he created one of the biggest political and cultural Rorschach tests of the year for the in-search-of-its-new-self GOP — from the floor of CPAC to the bar at the Capitol Hill Club to the offices of the Log Cabin Republicans.

But for Ohio’s junior senator, the enlightened self-interest seems clear. Full story

Questions for Portman on His Gay-Marriage Conversion

Rob Portman’s position reversal to support gay marriage creates one of the biggest political and cultural Rorschach tests of the year for the in-search-of-its-new-self Republican Party. (see Roll Call news story.)

From the floor of the CPAC convention to the bar at the Capitol Hill Club to the offices of the Log Cabin Republicans, an enormous range of questions are being pondered now that the Ohio senator has revealed — on CNN last night and in the Columbus Dispatch this morning — that he changed his mind about one of the defining social issues of our time because one of his sons told him he is gay.

The story is undeniably important because it makes Portman, already one of the most serious and respected voices in the party on fiscal policy, the only current GOP senator publicly embrace same-sex marriage. But why? Full story