By Tom Prezelski
Re-posted from Rum, Romanism and Rebellion
I was going to write a snarky piece which said that Senator John
McCain's takedown of Ted Cruz, while effective, was nowhere nearly as
awesome as what his predecessor, Senator Henry Fountain Ashurst, did to
Huey Long in 1935, but my brother beat me to it in the Tucson Sentinel.
Ashurst,
a Shakespeare-quoting cowboy turned lawyer, was elected to the Territorial
House of Representatives in 1897 where he became Speaker at the age of
23, the youngest legislative leader in Arizona's history. There, the Coconino County Democrat was
credited with the legislation that created the normal school that
eventually became Northern Arizona University.
Upon statehood,
Ashurst was one of Arizona's two new United States Senators. While never
known as a particularly effective legislator, his unparalleled skill as
an orator made him well loved in the halls of Congress and the ideal
man to put the self-aggrandizing Senator from Louisiana in his place.
As I said, go check out Ted's piece in the Sentinel.
