Senator Rand Paul took a shot at Paul Ryan last night, just as the former vice presidential candidate was returning to D.C. to decide if he will run for House speaker.

The Kentucky Republican faulted Ryan for cutting a 2013 deal with then-Senate Budget Committee chair Patty Murray (D., Wash.) that diminished the spending cuts mandated through sequestration. “I don’t get to vote in the House [on] the speaker, so I haven’t been saying much about individuals,” he told reporters during a press call Monday evening. “I will say about the deal a year and a half ago — when we got rid of the spending cuts that were part of the sequester, when a deal was made between Paul Ryan and Patty Murray — that it was a bad deal. I opposed it, and it was really relinquishing the power of the purse and the only good thing that had probably happened in years up here. So, it was a big mistake.”

Paul’s criticism comes as Ryan and the House Republican conference are set to meet Tuesday evening to discuss their October agenda. Ryan has taken heavy fire from talk-radio hosts and prominent conservative activists in recent weeks, even as he made clear that he would run for speaker only if he were a true consensus choice to unite the conference.

On Meet the Press Sunday, Senator Ted Cruz (R., Texas) claimed that he didn’t want to weigh in on the House speaker’s race, but declined to answer when asked repeatedly if he thinks that Ryan is a “true conservative.” “That’s a decision for House Republicans to make and for the American people to make,” Cruz told host Chuck Todd. At the mention of talk radio show host Mark Levin, an aggressive critic of Ryan’s, he was less coy. “Mark Levin is definitely a true conservative,” he said.

#share#It’s a far cry from 2012, when Cruz was a Senate candidate and Ryan had just been tapped as Mitt Romney’s running mate. “If the presidential race focuses on ideas — on the stark contrast between free markets and Obama’s failed economic agenda — we win,” Cruz wrote in a Facebook post at the time. “And Paul has long been a serious and fearless champion of reining in out-of-control government.”

#related#Lawmakers who have spoken to Ryan say he’s aware of the danger that some conservatives have been given an incentive to attack him, thereby hamstringing his as-yet hypothetical speakership.

“He’s getting enormous pressure to ‘take one for the team’ and I’m afraid today that there’s no taking one,” a House Republican told National Review last week. “It’s the [political] equivalent of having B-52s come overhead, about to drop bombs, and you dive on the grenade. . . . You didn’t save any lives; the problem out-scoped your capacity to protect.”

— Joel Gehrke is a political reporter for National Review.