Defiant Ted Cruz doubles down on calling GOP senate leader liar

Republican presidential hopeful Senator Ted Cruz on Thursday doubled down on calling his Party's leader in the U.S. Senate a liar despite his campaign's recently intensified efforts to court GOP elites.

"Every word I said there was true and accurate," said Cruz during a town hall hosted by MSNBC in Buffalo, New York.

The showdown between Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and Cruz, a darling of the conservative Tea Party who had for long built reputation on bashing the GOP establishment, came last July when the junior senator from Texas called McConnell a liar during a senate floor speech on the expired Export-Import Bank.

"We now know that when the majority leader looks us in the eye and makes a commitment, he is willing to say something he knows is false," said Cruz at the time, accusing McConnell of lying to Republican colleagues in private meetings about his intention of reviving the Ex-Im Bank.

The conservative wing of the GOP had long been attacking the Ex-Im Bank as an example of "crony capitalism."

While his blistering accusation sparked fierce backlash from Republican colleagues, who argued that the accusation had broken Senate rules, Cruz on Thursday defended his remarks.

"The reaction in the Senate is 'How dare you say that out loud? They're not upset that somebody lied to them. I mean, that's the amazing thing," said Cruz.

According to the Senate rules, available on the Senate website, no senator in debate "shall, directly or indirectly, by any form of words impute to another Senator or to other Senators any conduct or motive unworthy or unbecoming a Senator."

Long before his anti-establishment presidential campaign began 12 months ago, Cruz had few friends on Capitol Hill and was viewed by congressional Republicans as rigid ideologue who preferred to act alone to push forward right-wing agendas at the cost of shutting down the government.

The aversion to Cruz in Washington has been summed up by a well-known joke here that goes like this: the best way for U.S. President Barack Obama to generate eight vacancies on the U.S. Supreme Court would be to nominate Cruz to the body.

As the bellicose GOP front-runner Donald Trump continued strides toward securing nomination of the Republican Party, GOP elites have become obvious in their desperate attempts to stop Trump from being nominated and begun turning to the exact man they had loathed previously and still dislike now.

In recent weeks, former Florida Governor Jeb Bush and Senator Lindsey Graham from South Carolina, both of whom had bowed out of the 2016 White House race, endorsed Cruz.

Cruz, however, had so far only garnered two endorsements from 54 Republicans in the Senate.

Source: XINHUA