Rare News Desk
Chuck Hagel is out as secretary of defense, but Ted Cruz has his candidate for replacing him: Joe Lieberman.
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Nobody knows how to troll liberals as well as Cruz. And Lieberman is a Democrat who could conceivably be acceptable to a majority of Republicans in the Senate.
But constitutional conservatives and libertarians seeking a more restrained foreign policy should be at least as concerned.
Cruz led the charge against Hagel when President Obama nominated him for secretary of defense. Hagel was a former Republican senator. He had supported every Republican presidential candidate until John McCain in 2008, including Ronald Reagan for two terms.
Hagel’s lifetime American Conservative Union rating was 83.7. He voted with the National Right to Life Committee 85 percent of the time during his final year in the Senate, 100 percent from 2005-06.
Lieberman, on the other hand, was Al Gore’s running mate in 2000. He ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004 and voted for Harry Reid as majority leader until leaving the Senate.
The Democrat Cruz likes better than Hagel opposed every Republican presidential candidate until McCain, including Reagan. His lifetime American Conservative Union rating was 15.79 and he scored a zero in 2005. Lieberman voted to keep partial-birth abortion legal.
Lieberman teamed with McCain and Lindsey Graham as the Senate’s hawkish “three amigos.”
While Cruz made allegations about shady donations, the real reason Cruz disliked Hagel — and loves Lieberman — is foreign policy.
Lieberman was a dead-ender in his support for the Iraq War and wants repeats in Iran and Syria. Hagel turned against the Iraq war when few Republicans were willing to do so publicly and has been more cautious about future military interventions.
That’s all well and good. We are talking about secretary of defense, where matters of war and peace are paramount.
But Cruz was once viewed as someone willing to change the GOP’s foreign policy rather than preserve the McCain-Lieberman status quo.
When Cruz ran in the Texas Republican primary for U.S. Senate, he enjoyed the endorsements of Ron and Rand Paul. He has reached out to groups like Young Americans for Liberty and (like this author) spoke at the Campaign for Liberty’s Liberty Action Political Conference.
To give credit where it’s due, when it comes to surveillance and opposing wars before they start, Cruz’s record is actually better than Hagel’s. Hagel was for things like the Iraq war and the Patriot Act before he was against them.
But Cruz has been signaling he is more hawkish in recent months. He pointedly positioned himself between McCain and the Pauls on foreign policy. Cruz’s model? Ronald Reagan, naturally.
In an interview with Stephen Hayes in the Weekly Standard, Cruz implicitly criticized Rand Paul. “I don’t agree with him on foreign policy,” he has said, though he acknowledged agreeing “we should be very reluctant to deploy military forces abroad.”
Joe Lieberman doesn’t think we should be very reluctant. Although he opposed the Vietnam War as a young man, it’s hard to find a major military intervention since the end of the Cold War that he has opposed.
Here Cruz comes dangerously close to establishing foreign policy as a litmus test for Republicans and conservatives. Only the most reflexive hawks, like Lieberman, may apply. Even the most moderate skeptics, like Hagel, are disqualified.
Again, Cruz might argue that this only true for the defense secretary post. But the last Republican who doubted Hagel’s GOP credentials while touting Lieberman wasn’t very conservative. His name was John McCain.
If Cruz has learned anything from what went wrong in Iraq or Afghanistan, Lieberman and McCain surely have not.
Cruz’s Lieberman comments are unlikely to have any substantive impact, but they do raise important questions.
Where does Cruz stand in the GOP foreign-policy debate? And would he still oppose a big-government foreign policy when pushed by a Republican president?
Right now, the signs aren’t very encouraging.
