Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) received harsh criticism for his appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference one week after he abandoned Texas during a fatal winter storm to vacation in Cancun.

"Ted Cruz is so tone deaf, one wonders if the gravitational shift of millions of eyes rolling at once feeds his life force," Erin Gloria Ryan wrote for The Daily Beast. "The never-funny Senator was at it again this week at CPAC, attempting to poke fun at himself for literally leaving his constituents out in the cold only a week ago. 'I gotta say, Orlando is awesome!' Cruz said. 'It's not as nice as Cancun, but it's nice.' Does he think that helped? Does he think at all?"

The House of Representatives was expected to stay pass midnight and into early Saturday morning to pass a $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package.

A procedure vote late Friday night passed on a party-line vote, suggesting Republicans would unite against the bill that pollsters say is popular with American voters.

Social media was ablaze this morning with a video taken at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington of a golden statue in the image of Donald Trump. People right away associated the graven image with the golden calf of the Bible—when Moses took so long bringing Yahweh's Law down from Mt. Sinai that his brother succumbed to pressure to erect an idol to a competing god. "Mentioned in Exodus 32 and I Kings 12 in the Old Testament, worship of the golden calf is seen as a supreme act of apostasy, the rejection of a faith once confessed," according to the Encyclopedia Britannica. "The figure is probably a representation of the Egyptian bull god Apis in the earlier period and of the Canaanite fertility god Baal in the latter."

Now, there's more important stuff going on right now. The parliamentarian of the United States Senate, for instance, ruled last night that the provision in the president's covid relief package that raises the federal minimum wage to $15 an hour cannot pass by way of "reconciliation," which is a special budget rule requiring a simple majority instead of the usual 60 votes. That, plus the reluctance of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema to monkey with the rule, means the hard work of governance is becoming visible. By comparison, a statue of "the Golden Ass," as someone quipped, seems rather petty. I disagree. This image captures something important and dire about the forces that still threaten our republic. It's worth our time thinking about them.