Can Ted Cruz resist picking losing fights with his own party?

Cruz also has a capacity to think through different perspectives. In college, he told me, he supported legalizing drugs, particularly marijuana, for two reasons: personal freedom and the apparent intractability of the international drug trade. By the end of college, though, he came to oppose legalization again. He had concluded, he said, that legalizing drugs would encourage their use by lessening the social stigma, and that the evidence didn’t support the argument that legalization would end the violence and criminality of the transnational cartels. “The more I looked at the issue, the less I was persuaded of that benefit,” he recalled.

Similarly, he explained that he was initially undecided about Democratic Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s proposal to address sexual assault in the military by taking the decision-making authority for such prosecutions out of the chain of command, but he had been persuaded by the evidence presented during the course of the hearings and decided to support Gillibrand’s bill. (He was bemused at the fact that his support for the bill had surprised some observers and asked one of his staffers to forward me a particularly incredulous article that had appeared in a New York paper in response.)

In other words, there’s a converse to Cruz’s frustration with those Republicans he sees as trying to have it both ways: He’s temperate enough when people openly disagree. Sometimes he even listens. And that, I think, suggests a path forward for Cruz’s antagonists, both within and outside the Republican Party, which is that those who want to fight him should just go ahead and do so rather than engaging in the Senate’s favored passive-aggressive dance.