Cruz's Friday speech immediately kicked off with reference to his decision to travel to Cancun with his family amid recent bouts of extreme winter weather, power outages and related deaths in his home state.
"I gotta say, Orlando is awesome!" the lawmaker exclaimed to the in-person crowd. "It's not as nice as Cancun," he quipped, pausing for audience response, "but it's nice!"
The jokes kept coming as Cruz used his speech time at the conservative conference to comment on another hot topic: Former Rep. John Boehner's (R-OH) new audiobook.
It was revealed yesterday that Boehner, former speaker of the House of Representatives from 2011 to 2015, went off-script in several sections of his audio recording of his upcoming book, "On The House: A Washington Memoir."
"Oh, and Ted Cruz, go f**k yourself," Boehner remarks at one point, according to Axios sources.
"You know yesterday, John Boehner made some news. He suggested that I do something that was anatomically impossible," Cruz remarked before pulling a Mariah Carey. "To which my response was, who’s John Boehner?"
The Texas senator notably taunted Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in reference to the deadly January 6 riot on Capitol Hill.
"AOC is telling us she was murdered," he said to the crowd, receiving mixed reactions. The New York congresswoman recently recounted the storming of the capitol building in a live social media broadcast.
"Bernie is wearing mittens. And AOC is telling she was murdered!" -- Ted Cruz mocks Democrats pic.twitter.com/K9d01yDVsF
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 26, 2021
CPAC, which runs Friday through Sunday, comes at a divisive time for the diverse Republican Party.
Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) declared in a Tuesday memo that the "Republican Civil War is now cancelled," referring to the recent fracturing of the party into pro- and anti-Trump factions.
"Some of you voted for President Trump enthusiastically, some with reservations, and some with great reluctance. It doesn’t matter. We got 74 million votes, and we can easily add to our numbers if we work together," he wrote days ahead of the CPAC conference.
Scott's comments came after Trump took several jabs at McConnell last week - even calling him a "dour, sullen, and unsmiling political hack" who "will never do what needs to be done, or what is right for our Country."
"If Republican senators are going to stay with him, they will not win again," he said of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who proclaimed on the Senate Floor that "there is no question" Trump was "practically and morally responsible" for inciting the deadly January 6 riot.
Though Trump is set to close out CPAC with a highly-anticipated Sunday speech, neither McConnell nor former Vice President Mike Pence will be in attendance at the conference.
