One week after Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) introduced legislation to fine the State Department for delaying its annual report on Iran’s human rights record, the Obama administration is acceding to his demand and finally producing the report.
After delaying the release of the report since late February, apparently in an effort to play nice with Iran, the State Department is scheduled to release the report on Thursday. This comes just one week after Cruz introduced the Human Rights Accountability Act, which would have cut the State Department’s budget by 5% for every month they continued to delay release of the report. Cruz’s tactic of shaming the administration for their appeasement and enacting deserved consequences has similarly netted results earlier this month when the Department of Defense was forced to release the annual report on the military power of Iran – another report they delayed for months.
“It is unfortunate that it took the threat of a fine to get the Department of State to release the Annual Human Rights Report, but after their June 9th response to my request I felt there was no choice,” Cruz told Conservative Review. Existing statute compels them to provide Congress with this information and while some delays might be understandable, to be unprecedentedly late this year was unacceptable.
Indeed, hard-ball tactics and aggressive messaging gets the job done.
Once again, Senator Ted Cruz is showing that a conservative can serve as an effective voice in the Senate, even as a member of the minority within bipartisan oligarchy. For all the talk about Cruz being relegated to a mere bomb thrower, he has already accrued a number of foreign policy victories. And he hasn’t done so by being obsequious to the ruling class.
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There is the false notion in the media and among some figures in the conservative intelligentsia that one must be a collegial governor in order to be effective and govern prudently. They also believe that someone who is too combative will never make a good president. The reality is the opposite. The only way to accomplish anything with this increasingly fringe liberal oligarchy in Washington is to shame them into acquiescence, not engage on their terms.
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