Trump, eggs and the CAGOP convention

Good morning and welcome to May.

California Republicans greeted all three remaining GOP presidential candidates over the weekend, a big deal for partisans in a state that rarely matters in the primary process. 

The main event, or at least the one with protests, was Donald Trump’s speech Friday. Compared to a situation where protestors were throwing eggs at police, busting through barricades and rerouting a candidate’s entrance through a hole in the fence along the 101, the appearances of Texas Senator Ted Cruz and Ohio Governor John Kasich were quite tame.

Cruz’s VP pick — unsuccessful presidential and Senate candidate Carly Fiorina — also spoke. Like Kasich and Cruz, no one hurled eggs in her name either. 

California Republicans also changed the party’s rules to allow for up to two more terms for their popular chairman, Jim Brulte. CalWatchdog has more. 

In other news:

• A new poll suggests that more than one-third of Bay Area residents are ready to leave within the next few years due to traffic and housing costs. The San Jose Mercury News has more. 
• Cruz has traveled the country criticizing the Obama economy. But at the CAGOP convention this weekend, he had to change his tune slightly in a state where the economy has improved during the Democratic administration of Gov. Jerry Brown, reports the Los Angeles Times.
• “The Los Angeles-based AIDS Healthcare Foundation is touting a new study that suggests people who see condoms in adult video are more likely to use them in their own sex lives,” reports LA Weekly.
• California voters may have to decide in November on whether to legalize recreational marijuana. But the $2.7 billion medical marijuana industry still lacks comprehensive oversight, reports The Orange County Register. 

Assembly:

• In at 1 p.m. 

Senate:

• In at 2 p.m.
• Packed Appropriations Committee agenda. 

Gov. Brown:

• At 10:30 a.m. on the west steps of the Capitol building, Brown will attend the California Peace Officers’ Memorial Ceremony. 
• At 1:30 p.m., Brown will attend a Wildfire Awareness Week event in McClellan.

Tips: matt@calwatchdog.com

Follow us: @calwatchdog @mflemingterp

New followers: @CASenatorJim @robviglione

Burlingame –

Earlier this week, Texas Senator Ted Cruz announced the former Hewlett-Packard CEO as his prospective running mate, in an effort to grab headlines and the Golden State, where Fiorina once unsuccessfully ran for Senate.  

Mathematically, there aren’t enough delegates left for Cruz to shore up the nomination prior to the convention, but Team Cruz hopes to stop Trump from getting the required 1,237 delegates to win the nomination outright. 

Fiorina admitted she wasn’t a football expert, but knew enough to know the presidential race “ain’t” over, as she said pundits have suggested. 

“The 30-yard line ain’t a touchdown,” Fiorina said.

Trump has 997 pledged delegates, while Cruz only has 566. In total, there are 502 delegates up for grabs through the remaining contests, including California’s 172. Trump has a commanding lead in the Golden State at the moment, although there’s a lifetime (in politics) until the June 7 primary. 

The Indiana primary is on Tuesday, where 57 delegates are up for grabs. Cruz and business tycoon Donald Trump are virtually tied in the Real Clear Politics polling average. But a big win for Trump would all but guarantee the nomination. 

Fiorina also ran for the GOP presidential nomination, but dropped out in February after her campaign failed to gain traction. In 2010, she challenged Barbara Boxer for the Democrat’s U.S. Senate seat, losing by 10 points (by nearly 1 million votes). 

Because of the large number of delegates, California is seen as the last stand for those trying to stop Trump (although Cruz has been running for president about three months longer than Trump).

“This is a fight for the soul of our party and the future of our nation,” Fiorina said. 

The Ohio governor represents an important swing state. As a member of Congress, he chaired the House Budget Committee, where he was considered the architect of the deal that balanced the federal budget. And he was instrumental in the major welfare reform legislation of the 1990s.

He shies away from talking too much about social issues, the Republicans’ Achilles Heel. He even polls well in the general — the only Republican topping Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton. 

Yet, he’s struggled to matter in the race. His only primary victory so far has been his home state and he has relatively few delegates. In fact, he still hasn’t surpassed Marco Rubio’s delegate count, even though the Florida Senator has been out of the race since mid March.

However, recent polling in California, where 172 delegates are up for grabs, shows Kasich with 20 percent of support (just behind Texas Senator Ted Cruz, but way behind business tycoon Donald Trump). The overall goal, with an outright win out of reach, is to push the nomination to an open, national GOP convention this summer.

“The only adult in the room”

Assembly Republican Leader Chad Mayes offered the same praise that Kasich has drawn throughout the contest, that Kasich is “the only adult in the room.”

“Gov. Kasich is ready to be president on Day One,” Mayes said while introducing Kasich at the CAGOP convention Friday night. “He can unite the party and win the White House. Republicans, he is our best choice.”

Does he unite the party?

Electability matters to voters, but the supporters of every candidate believe their guy or gal is electable. 

Kasich’s biggest knock is his acceptance of the Medicaid expansion offered through Obamacare, which Republican governors refused largely rejected.

“‘Now, when you die and get to the meeting with St. Peter, he’s probably not going to ask you much about what you did about keeping government small,'” Kasich said to an Ohio legislator at the time who was making an anti-government expansion argument. “‘But he is going to ask you what you did for the poor. You better have a good answer.’ ”

However, that decision has haunted him, said Republican strategist Rob Stuzman, who is part of an effort to stop Trump from winning the nomination by trying to get either Kasich or Cruz over the top.

“The knock on him throughout the race are the things he’s down in Ohio in expanding the size government that have held him back from a lot of conservative support that he probably would have had earlier in his career,” Stutzman said. 

Heidi Leupp, from Hillsborough, said she supports Kasich because of both his executive and legislative experience. She sees a winner, someone who polls well against the likely Democratic nominee, but is also popular in his own state. 

“Although he’s an outsider now, he does know how Washington works,” Leupp said. 

In a contentious primary season that’s been dominated by “mud-slinging,” Kasich has stayed above the fray, which Leupp finds attractive. But, she concedes, that both limits the amount of media attention he receives and differs from the tone of much of the electorate. 

“He doesn’t call people names, he doesn’t get into the mud, and because of that, he might not get the media exposure the mud-slingers get,” Leupp said. “But for the thoughtful voter, who looks at issues and looks at experience and looks at electability — which might be the most important thing — he is the perfect candidate.”

Kasich

To reporters on Friday, Kasich admitted that “it isn’t working out right now,” but pointed to a recent string of second-place finishes as dramatic improvement. 

“I was invisible until about eight weeks ago,” Kasich said. He added he believed people ultimately want to be positive, unified and feel good about future. “That’s why I win in the general — it’s starting to resonate.”

Even when reporters tried to trip him up with questions on abortion, Kasich defended his pro-life position and record while saying “you have to respect people who don’t agree with you on this issue.”

“I don’t intend to spend a lot of time focusing on (social issues),” Kasich said. “I intend to talk about what I think is the greatest crisis we have today, which is the lack of economic growth.”

Would it be the same insult-slinging, filterless personality Americans have grown accustomed to seeing on T.V., who protesters waited for hours just to throw eggs at and block his limo from entering the hotel complex thereby forcing him to enter through a back way?

Or would the business tycoon and GOP presidential frontrunner be more subdued to look more presidential — as media reports have recently suggested — while speaking to a politically experienced and partisan audience?

Wastes no time

His introductory video took shots at right-leaning media personalities, like Fox News’ Megyn Kelly, Washington Post columnist George Will and Republican strategist and talking head Karl Rove, who have at times doubted, challenged or decried a Trump candidacy. The video ended with a freeze frame of his hand (which has surprisingly been a storyline during the campaign) looming large above a crowd. 

The beginning of his speech chronicled his efforts to get inside, which was “not the easiest entrance” he’d ever made, having to go “under a fence and through a fence.” (A later account added mud and dirt.)

Here’s the hole in the fence Trump used to evade protestors adjacent to the 101.

“Oh boy, I felt like I was crossing the border,” Trump said. 

And with that, he launched into an extemporaneous, 20 or so minute speech that was short on policy — he mentioned building a wall across the U.S./Mexico border (“We want people to come in our country, but they have to come in legally,” Trump said) and bashed multiple trade deals — but was long on bravado and digs at other candidates.

Content

Trump spoke largely about how he’s “winning” the race for the nomination, how he’ll soon “win” the nomination and how he’ll make America “win.”

“America doesn’t win anymore,” Trump said, noting that as of today his campaign has 1,001 delegates locked down of the 1,237 delegates needed to win the nomination.

“I’m killing it, everybody,” Trump said. 

Trump spoke of a need for party unification. He spoke highly of the “incredible” Ben Carson, a former candidate who has since endorsed Trump.

Trump often complimented CAGOP Chairman Jim Brulte, who “did such a great job.”

He bragged about how he would compete and campaign in states that he said other Republican candidates write off, like New York (his home state) and Michigan. 

“No Republican would campaign in Michigan,” Trump said, overlooking the 2012 GOP nominee, Mitt Romney — the son of a former Republican governor of the Michigan — who vowed last cycle to campaign in the Great Lake State until the end.  

He spoke favorably of another former candidate, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, who this week was announced as Sen. Ted Cruz’s running mate (assuming he gets the nomination). 

“I like Carly,” Trump said, before adding that Carly brings no delegates with her to the Texan’s ticket (she technically won one delegate in Iowa).

On Cruz and Ohio Gov. John Kasich, the other two remaining GOP candidates, Trump said they were acting like “spoiled children” for continuing to stay in the race. Cruz has only 565 delegates and Kasich has only 153. 

Trump also doubled down on his favorite critique of former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, also a former candidate.

“Low energy,” Trump said. “Very low energy.”

Trump referred to Kasich eating as “disgusting.” Kasich eating at campaign stops has been another surprising side theme of the primary.  

“Did you ever see him do a news conference without eating,” Trump asked.

Trump decried the trend of candidates savaging each other in the primary, only to ultimately fall in line and support the other when one drops.

“Ted Cruz, he’s a wonderful guy,” Trump said. “But I don’t want his endorsement.”

Highlights of Twitter’s coverage of Trump’s entrance and the protests

https://twitter.com/hunterschwarz/status/726140981658193921 https://twitter.com/ccadelago/status/726136663554957312 https://twitter.com/ccadelago/status/726149867010056192 https://twitter.com/LATSeema/status/726122131860262912 https://twitter.com/LATSeema/status/726122723806601217 https://twitter.com/LATSeema/status/726128380215590913 https://twitter.com/eastbaycitizen/status/726096358612963328

• Presidential campaign focus on CA
• Cruz and Carly
• Legislator pay panel can’t get quorum
• UC Davis chancellor placed on leave during investigation

Good morning. Happy Friday eve!

All eyes are on California as presidential candidates on both sides of the aisle are planning big pushes in the Golden State.

A poll last week showed Sen. Bernie Sanders within six points of Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton in California, with 12 percent of respondents undecided. 

Both campaigns have “zeroed in on California as a must win,” writes CalWatchdog. Although big losses on Tuesday for Sanders has the Vermonter “conceding he’d now have to focus on merely influencing the party’s agenda.”

In other news:

• Republicans are also eyeing California, as Sen. Ted Cruz announced Wednesday that he’d selected former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina as his running mate. The Texas senator’s announcement seemed premature, as he’s not the nominee nor even the frontrunner. The move confused many observers as Fiorina has not been very successful as a candidate, including earlier this cycle as a presidential candidate. Plus, after losing a Senate race in 2010, she left CA for Virginia. The San Jose Mercury News has more.
• And just because: Former Speaker John A. Boehner, R-Ohio, said Wednesday at Stanford University that Cruz was “Lucifer in the flesh,” and the most “miserable son of a bitch” he’s ever met, reports The Stanford Daily. 

• Last month, CalWatchdog reported that the commission on state lawmaker pay was plagued by vacancies. This month, the California Citizens Compensation Commission had to cancel its annual meeting scheduled for Wednesday due to lack of quorum. The governor is supposed to appoint commissioners within 15 days of a vacancy, with the shortest of the three vacancies spanning more than a year. The CCCC’s duty — which came out of a sweeping ethics reform package, Proposition 112, in 1990 — is to decide the pay and benefits of constitutional officers (like governor and attorney general) and state legislators. CalWatchdog has more. 
• Linda Katehi, the embattled chancellor of UC Davis, was placed on administrative leave by UC President Janet Napolitano on Wednesday, to allow for an investigation into “‘serious questions’ raised about her involvement in campus jobs for family members, possible misuse of student service fee revenue and misstatements about her role in social media contracts,” according to the Los Angeles Times. And The Sacramento Bee compiled a timeline of stories about Katehi, dating back to 2011, just before the pepper-spraying-of-students incident. 
• Congressional oddities: A Republican challenger to Rep. Pete Aguilar is accusing the Redlands Democrat of stealing his campaign signs, reports The Press-Enterprise. And an ethics watchdog group “has filed complaints with two federal oversight agencies, asking officials to investigate what the group describes as a pattern of questionable campaign spending by Rep. Duncan D. Hunter, R-Alpine,” reports The San Diego Union Tribune. 

Assembly:

• In at 9 a.m., with a few hearings today. 

Senate: 

• In at 9 a.m., full slate of budget hearings. 

Gov. Brown:

• No public events scheduled.

Tips: matt@calwatchdog.com

Follow us: @calwatchdog @mflemingterp

New followers: @Taxeconomist @ALEC_states

In short order, all three remaining GOP candidates will have descended on California. Each has a speaking slot at the state party spring convention. “Trump will speak at a lunch banquet the opening day of the state convention in Burlingame, on April 29,” the Sacramento Bee reported. “Kasich will speak that evening, followed by Cruz the next day.” Expectations have already ratcheted up. In his first rally in state this month, Cruz predicted that California would “decide the Republican nomination for president.”

Clash of ideologies

But the decision may not tilt Cruz’s way. A new CBS poll, for instance, showed Trump at 49 percent among Republican primary voters in California, with Cruz at 31 and John Kasich at 16. “At the race’s current pace, Trump would need a sizable win there — as well as strong performances in between — to clinch the nomination outright,” CBS concluded. “The divergent views on the process and the division within the party are tied up with more than just strategic candidate attachments,” the network added, noting that Trump and Cruz supporters in California and New York and Pennsylvania, two other delegate-rich states around the corner, “see themselves as part of a movement, something larger than themselves and their vote.”

That ideological factor has threatened to fracture the California GOP to an even greater extent than it has already endured. Donald Trump used California’s struggles with immigration policy — and the state party’s — as fodder on the national campaign trail, depicting himself as the only Republican capable of shielding Americans from whatever security risks a relatively more generous immigration policy might pose. California Republicans have long been divided over how to approach unlawful immigration, with party leaders seeking to soften or moderate their stance amid protests from grassroots activists.

The organization race

“Cruz’s campaign has been eying California as a linchpin in its strategy to reach the 1,237 delegates needed to win the GOP nomination — or at least keep Trump from hitting the same target. Cruz’s campaign is confident it can win the state, claiming in an internal memo last month that it was on track to receive at least 55 percent of the vote,” the Texas Tribute noted. “Yet given its size and population, California could also hold promise for a candidate like Trump who tends to be more ubiquitous on the air than the ground.”

Trump’s late-in-the-game hiring of a California campaign director has fit the pattern of his slow or nonexistent response to Cruz’s diligent efforts. But the hire, Tim Clark, has raised eyebrows among longtime state observers. Clark “is a well-respected Sacramento political operative who has run statewide campaigns over the past two decades, including for Fresno Mayor Ashley Swearengin, a rising star in the California GOP,” the Sacramento Bee reported. “He’s thrifty and sharp, too. Last year, Clark spent only $200,000 to help John Moorlach win an Orange County state Senate seat over an opponent who spent roughly four times that much.”

Dry run

All three candidates have hoped to prepare for California by competing in New York’s approaching primary — which, like California, awards delegates proportionally, not winner-take-all. Even though Trump has sustained a daunting lead in his home state, around 50 percent, the Cruz and Kasich campaigns have recognized the value of racking up whatever delegates they can. “It is a system akin to California’s June 7 primary,” the Los Angeles Times observed, “thus offering a sort of dry run for the contest that will either settle the GOP nominating fight or provoke hand-to-hand warfare all the way to the July convention.”

With Republican party leaders casting about for a way to stop Donald Trump, California has emerged as a possible firewall. Although a new poll of likely Republican primary voters, issued by the Public Policy Institute of California, showed Trump besting Ted Cruz by 38 to 19 percent, with John Kasich at 12 percent, Cruz’s ability to wring an advantage in delegates out of states where he lost the vote outright has contributed to a sense that the Trump phenomenon might not be a disaster for established GOP officials.

Surmounting Trump will be a challenge. With Marco Rubio removed from the lineup and voters’ second choices incorporated into the poll, PPIC showed Trump still stands at 38 percent, with Cruz up to 27 percent and Kasich at 14.

“Trump continues to surpass expectations,” as the San Jose Mercury News reported. “He is the leading candidate across age, income, education and gender groupings, the poll found, despite being targeted by a multimillion-dollar negative ad campaign and being called ‘a phony’ and ‘a fraud’ by the GOP’s 2012 nominee, Mitt Romney. Trump’s poll numbers have soared since the last major survey of California voters — a January Field Poll — which showed Cruz with a narrow lead.”

Because of California’s increased relevance this election, however, and Trump’s polarizing effect, the state GOP could find a silver lining in other ways. “The way the delegate math works out could hand Donald Trump the delegates he needs, or it could guarantee a contested Republican convention,” Reason noted.

Boosting turnout

At the same time, some analysts have predicted that the Trump effect “could bring 15 to 30 percent more Republicans to the polls — both to vote for and against him,” as the Chronicle reported.

“The immediate beneficiaries of a Trump bump could be the Republicans on the U.S. Senate ballot, none of whom has been given much chance to finish in the top two in the race and advance to the general election in November,” the paper added. “Typically, about 46 percent of the voters in a California primary vote Republican. But the Trump factor — and the love-him-or-hate-him voters he is expected to drive to the polls here, as he has elsewhere — could boost Republican turnout enough to vault one of the Republicans into the top two.”

Unlike some states where Trump has fared especially well, California is a so-called closed primary state, allowing only Republicans to vote for Republicans seeking their party’s nomination.

The change from California’s usual tail-end position in the primary-season doldrums has added more drama to an already disruptive race. “When George W. Bush ran in 2000 and 2004 and Sen. John McCain in 2008, California wasn’t a factor. In 2012, despite a high number of candidates early in the race, Mitt Romney was safely on his way to the nomination when California Republicans voted. Los Angeles County only drew 16.3 percent of eligible voters when Romney and President Barack Obama were the party nominees,” according to the Los Angeles Daily News. “San Bernardino County didn’t fare much better, bringing in just 15.4 percent of eligible voters. But the Trump phenomenon has seen a surge in voting on the Republican side.”

The day after

That surge has come at Trump’s expense as well as in his favor, as voting patterns in California-adjacent states have suggested. In Nevada, Trump touted his ability to draw in new voters from across the demographic spectrum. At the same time, however, his decision to question “whether Arizona Sen. John McCain — a prisoner of war for more than five years in Vietnam — is an authentic war hero sparked furious rebukes from his fellow GOP presidential candidates and from veterans groups,” as the San Francisco Chronicle recalled separately. But Trump later swept the Arizona primary.

Results like that have left some California Republicans worried that Trump could wind up acing out the competition in California but leaving behind an even more divided and dispirited state party.

With California’s delegate-rich primary election looming for Republicans as a possible last chance to stop Donald Trump from rolling to the nomination, Trump has established a commanding lead in the polls and a beachhead of support among the party’s California delegation in Congress.

Pollster James Lacy revealed that respondents now hand Trump 38.3 percent support in the state’s closed primary, with Ted Cruz at 22.4 percent, John Kasich at 19.7 percent, and Marco Rubio at 10.1 percent.

“Voters registering an ‘undecided’ opinion were 9.6 percent,” he noted. “Trump’s almost 16 percent advantage over Cruz is statistically significant and well above the margin of error of the poll, which is 4.8 percent. The poll results demonstrate that Trump’s standing among Republicans in the Golden State has grown significantly in the last two months.”

Divided loyalties

A Field survey released in January had Trump and Cruz in a dead heat, 23 percent to 25 percent, as The Hill reported. Cruz has attracted the support of established Golden State conservatives such as former California party chairman Ron Nehring, who Cruz named state chairman of his campaign.

But uneasy Republicans currently holding elective office could shift swiftly to Trump to avoid losing favor with key constituencies. “House majority leader Kevin McCarthy, speaking at a policy event hosted by the Public Policy Institute of California […], said the intensity of support for Donald Trump and depressed excitement among Democrats could boost the chances of other Republican candidates in California and the nation this fall,” the Sacramento Bee observed. Faced with unfavorable long-term demographic and cultural trends, party leaders in California have strained to find ways to bring new voters into the GOP. Although Trump’s capacity to alienate conservatives has been proven time and again, some influential California Republicans could try to leverage his candidacy as a way to make inroads into default Democrats dissatisfied with the state’s Bay Area-centric liberal leadership.

From Arnold to Donald

In fact, Trump’s dominance has served as a potent reminder of California Republicans’ taste for insurgency — and celebrity. Some analysts have drawn explicit parallels between the Trump campaign and former Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s. “There are differences of circumstance and differences of ideology, but the fact remains: Trump is paralleling Schwarzenegger’s campaign as a heavily branded, made-to-order conservative populist, and he’s succeeding,” wrote Kaleb Horton in Vanity Fair. “He’s succeeding because he knows how to work and persuade huge crowds, because he’s impossible to forget, because he knows how to jump on TV and entertain millions of people, and because he has a persona so intractable that he’ll never have to worry about perception management.”

“There was a lesson in Schwarzenegger’s campaign, if you squinted through the smoke. Politics is a test, but it’s not a standardized one. There is no true-or-false section where you’re disqualified if you don’t know the difference between secretary of state and secretary of defense. The essay is 90 percent of the grade, and it’s a big, broad open question — “What does America mean to you?” — and you can succeed through sheer style. If the crowd likes it when you call people losers, you can do that forever. There is no principal’s office.”

Whereas liberal state Democrats initially viewed Schwarzenegger as someone they could work with, however, their view of Trump has become completely hostile. (Schwarzenegger recently endorsed Kasich, who has deliberately run the least confrontational campaign among the remaining contenders.) At the same time, many have been reluctant even to consider that Trump could win the White House; most polls — but not all — have shown him losing to Hillary Clinton in a head to head matchup.

Gov. Jerry Brown recently captured the anxiety in remarks at a dinner for labor organizers, the Sacramento Bee reported. “If Trump were ever elected, we’d have to build a wall around California to defend ourselves from the rest of this country,” he lamented, adding quickly that he wasn’t being deadly serious. “We don’t like walls, we like bridges,” he added.

It is said that the filibuster — a procedural tool that blocks a vote — protects the minority from the tyranny of the majority. And Sanchez, a Democratic congresswoman from Orange County, knows what it’s like to be in the out-of-power minority, as she currently is in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, where majority rules.

“In the House of Representatives, I’ve seen what it is to have a lop-sided, winner take all system, and it hasn’t benefited Americans,” Sanchez said in an interview at the California Democratic Party Convention.

Reform efforts

The filibuster refers a long-standing Senate tradition. While it’s changed over the years, in modern times it usually means blocking the 60-vote threshold required to advance a bill.

There is also a standing filibuster — made popular in the 1939 movie “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” — where a Senator holds the floor as long as he or she is standing, thereby delaying action on a bill. The standing filibuster is rarely used nowadays though.

In 2013, then-Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., reduced the 60-vote threshold to a simple majority on most presidential nominations, excluding those for the Supreme Court.

Republicans in the House of Representatives, and a few in the Senate, have been calling for more filibuster changes as Senate Democrats have used the procedure to block legislation and gain leverage (the same thing Republicans did in the minority) — like forcing a budget deal at increased spending limits last year. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has so far been reluctant to change the rules further.

“When you’re in power in the Senate, you don’t much like the filibuster,” said Sanchez. “But when you’re out of power in the Senate, all of a sudden it’s your good friend.

Sanchez’s top opponent, Democrat Kamala Harris, California’s attorney general, has not responded to requests for comment.

History

It’s changed over the years. It was largely the standing filibuster before, where a senator could hold the floor as long as they could stand up, delaying a vote on a bill.

The longest standing filibuster was in 1957, when Strom Thurmond, a southern Democrat, held the floor for 24 hours and 18 minutes in opposition of the Civil Rights Act.

A few years ago, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, spoke for more than 21 hours straight. However, it technically wasn’t a filibuster because it didn’t delay a vote. Cruz had arranged an certain amount of time with Reid, and ended when he was supposed to.