Ted Cruz has done it. So has Tom Cotton. The two Republican senators, from Texas and Arkansas, respectively, have managed to muscle their way onto our TV screens and into our local newspapers with their actions, even though they’ve been on the job such a short time.
Same with Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts. She’s been on the job about two years and she’s everyone’s go-to gal when the subject of Hillary Clinton’s presidential candidacy comes up.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2015/04/01/elizabeth_warren_dems_must_emphasize_differences_with_gop.html
I posted a blog earlier this week about the late Edward Kennedy’s adherence to Senate tradition, how he didn’t make a floor speech until he’d been in office for a year.
https://highplainsblogger.com/2015/04/01/r-i-p-ted-kennedys-u-s-senate/
All bets are off these days. The new folks are not bashful at all about hogging up media air time and space.
Cruz is running for president. Cotton drafted that letter to the Iranian mullahs and recommended they reject a nuclear deal worked out by the United States.
Now it’s Warren.
Didn’t she say she “is not a candidate for president” in 2016? Why are the media still digging around the roots of that story?
Is she going to challenge Hillary Clinton in the Democratic Party primary or not? I thought she was declarative in her statement about not running. Oh, wait. She spoke in the present tense. “I am not running,” she said, if memory serves. That means the door is still slightly open for her to change her mind.
These new senators — and House members, too — are overshadowing the senior members.
Republican Orrin Hatch? He’s nowhere to be seen or heard. Democrat Barbara Boxer? She’s announced her impending retirement — and that’s been it. Republican Thad Cochran? He almost lost the GOP primary in Mississippi but got renominated on the strength of African-Americans who didn’t want the other guy to win. Democrat Patty Murray? She’s been as quiet as Hatch.
The new folks keep showing up. They’re everywhere.
The “new normal” in Washington is to let the newbies have the floor.