About that Ted-caved-on-ethanol meme . . .

In the late afternoon, this sentiment was fairly typical of what one saw at rightie sites:

Oh, and about that blendwall thing? This is the same Senator Cruz who last year was opposed to there being a minimum amount of ethanol blended in our gas.

Cruz has opposed the federal regulation that sets a minimum amount of renewable energy that must be blended into motor fuel. Iowa officials of both parties, including Gov. Terry Branstad, have insisted the standard is vital to the industry and have bitterly opposed a move by the Obama administration to roll it back.

That’s the exact opposite of what he’s saying now.

To be clear, some of what Cruz is saying here absolutely is what he’s been saying from the beginning: no subsidies, level playing field and all of that. I agree! But that’s not the question at hand. The real issue here is absolutely the RFS and the fact that after having previously said that he opposed the standard and would work to eliminate it, he’s now taking the same “talk out of both sides of your mouth” approach that Christie, Jeb Bush and – eventually – Carly Fiorina took. (I’ll leave Trump out of this since he sold out on the RFS and ethanol as soon as the first question was tossed to him.) So Ted wants to just “extend” the RFS to 2022, eh? How convenient that he wants to “phase it out” but that wouldn’t happen until two years after he won his reelection were he to become President. And this stand on the blendwall is an absolute pander to the ethanol lobby of the worst sort. 

If you read the rest of his editorial he goes into some of the worst and most deceptive marketing pablum put out by King Corn in support of knocking down the blendwall.

If allowed to reach the market, mid-level ethanol products like E25 or E30 could prove quite popular with American consumers, who are increasingly concerned with fuel economy. Ethanol is an effective fuel additive because it increases octane and decreases harmful tailpipe emissions.

That, my friends, is complete and utter crap. Please pardon my French, but I’m extremely disappointed right now. I’ve been saying for a long time that Cruz has very likely been the candidate who has impressed me the most this season and one of the biggest things in his favor was his position as the lone voice in the field standing strong against the ethanol lobby. I don’t know how many more votes Ted thinks this is going to pull in the Iowa caucus, but I sure hope he thinks it’s worth this level of a sell out. And don’t let them tell you that because some of what he’s saying here is the same as his previous stand that “he’s been saying this all along.” He’s on the record many, many times with the best, most conservative stand of anyone in the race right now on the ethanol question in terms of the specifics which really count and now he’s done a 180 degree flip flop on the key points. I hope he didn’t strain his neck with that bit of acrobatics.

But it seems that further scrutiny confirms Ted's consistency:

With some hasty blogging–and exacerbated by an Iowan’s mistaken assertion about the ethanol mandate, Ted Cruz’s shrewd answering, and the ethanol lobby’s odd response–I contributed to some confusion about Ted Cruz’s views on the ethanol mandate. (For the sake of candor, my original [probably misleading] post is at the bottom of this article.) … So, whence my confusion?
1) I figured if the ethanol lobby was applauding Cruz, then Cruz had changed. This was a simplistic assumption on my part.
2) I didn’t fully parse Cruz’s answer. The Iowan asked, basically, if Cruz would leave the mandate alone until 2022, and Cruz’s tone was one of agreement, and so I assumed he said yes. In fact, he didn’t. He still promised a “gradual phaseout” as above.
3) The whole thing was confused by a false premise in the Iowan’s question–a premise Cruz explicitly accepted: that under current law the ethanol mandate will expire in 2022.

Carney notes that this is consistent with the position Cruz has held since 2014: 

Sen. Ted Cruz in 2013 co-sponsored the “Renewable Fuel Standard Repeal Act,” which would immediately repeal the ethanol mandate. In 2014, he introduced a broad energy bill that would wind down the mandate over five years, slashing the federally mandated volume of renewable fuels (including corn ethanol) by twenty percent every year for five years.

And a phase out makes much more sense than an outright repeal if we actually want to see if the industry is economically viable and preserve the jobs associated with it rather than simply shut it down. Not to say shutting it down is bad, but phasing it out seems a better solution. A sizable number of kidney stones were also passed by Cruz announcing that he was against the “blend wall” that limits ethanol content. No one should have a problem with this. The problem is with the a) taxpayer subsidies and b) the mandatory use of the product. If someone develops a product based on a higher ethanol mix and people buy it, that is a good thing.

So he remains number one on LITD's list of Pub contenders.