Cruz, T Sen

brooks bros or recount? clerked for rhenquist

got gov gig after

see ted cruz 2

rank member jud subcomm that voted for 28th

capt 921

===

omg Bush v gore

On election night in Florida, Bush led Gore by 1,784 votes. Because of the closeness of the election, an automatic recount began two days later in every county. Hundreds of lawyers flocked to Florida. Ben Ginsberg, national counsel for the Bush campaign, called it “Woodstock for constitutional lawyers.”

Ted Cruz, a 29-year-old domestic-policy adviser on the Bush campaign at the time and a former law clerk for Chief Justice William Rehnquist, put together Bush’s legal team. One of his first calls was to John Roberts, whom Cruz knew from the close-knit network of former Rehnquist clerks,nicknamed the Cabal.

“We started to assemble a team of the best lawyers and in particular the best Supreme Court lawyers in the country, and John’s name naturally came near the top of the list,” Cruz told The New York Times in 2005. Roberts, who had clerked for Rehnquist in 1980 and was now in private practice, caught the next flight to Tallahassee.

Ted Cruz, then 29, put together George W. Bush’s legal team in the 2000 election fight.

Roberts had a long history of opposition to voting rights. As a young lawyer in Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department, Roberts led the charge against the 1982 reauthorization of the VRA, writing more than two dozen memos criticizing the landmark civil-rights law. Voting-rights violations “should not be made too easy to prove,” he wrote, and would lead to “a quota system in electoral politics.” Now he was helping the Bush team prevent eligible votes from being counted.

Roberts edited legal briefs, including the Bush campaign’s 50-page submission to the Supreme Court, and prepared Theodore Olson, a former assistant attorney general under Reagan, for oral arguments. He also advised Florida’s governor, Jeb Bush, on how the state legislature could assign its presidential electors to George W. Bush before the recount was finished. “I really appreciate your input on my role in this unique and historic situation,” Bush wrote to Roberts.

Roberts’s name appeared on no briefs, but his influence was unmistakable. “He is one of the finest legal writers of his generation,” Cruz said. “His editing pen was invaluable.”

The Bush campaign, which led by 327 votes after the automatic recount, wanted as few disputed ballots accepted as possible. When the Florida Supreme Court ordered a statewide manual recount, which favored Gore, Bush appealed to the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court halted Florida’s recount four days later, on December 12, thereby declaring Bush the winner of the election. No justice put his name on the unsigned 5–4 opinion.

The Court asserted that the recount violated the equal-protection clause of the14th Amendment— established in 1868 to secure the rights of African-Americans—because there was no uniform statewide standard for counting disputed ballots in each county. In a draft of her dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg observed in a footnote that if there was any equal- protection violation in Florida, it was because black voters encountered a disproportionate number of problems voting. Justice Antonin Scalia, her closest friend on the Court, objected to Ginsburg’s “Al Sharpton” footnote, according to The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin, and she took it out. When one read the Bush v. Gore decision, it was as if the disenfranchisement of black voters had never occurred.

Lawyer R. Ted Cruz, a Bush-Cheney campaign worker and former clerk to U.S. Chief Justice William Rehnquist, arrived in Tallahassee for the first time in his life within 24 hours of the election to work on briefs. He became part of an early inner circle that included more nationally prominent Republican lawyers such as George J. Terwilliger III and Benjamin L. Ginsberg, who had been an outside counsel to the campaign.

''It did give an opportunity for lawyers who had been supporting Bush to shine, to demonstrate what they were capable of,'' Cruz said. ``On a day-to-day basis, a campaign does not deal with senior constitutional litigators that often. It was an opportunity for the senior people on the campaign to see firsthand the abilities of these lawyers.''

Today, Cruz is director of policy and planning at the Federal Trade Commission, earning $138,200. Earlier, he did a stint as a Bush administration lawyer at the Justice Department, working on the transition to Ashcroft from former Attorney General Janet Reno.

up and coming?

This week Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) introduced the American Energy Renaissance Act(AERA), a plan to create new jobs and opportunities by harnessing our nation’s energy resources. Speaking at the Heritage Action for America’s 2014 Conservative Policy Summit, Sen. Cruz stated that:

“The government will not solve our economic problems by controlling the economy or placing bureaucratic barriers to growth. The only thing that it must do is what it did in the Ronald Reagan era: get out of our way and let Americans do what they do best: dream, innovate, and prosper.”

Five key measures for economic growth in the American Energy Renaissance Actare: (1) passage of the REINS Act; (2) Empowering the states to regulate energy development; (3) Stopping the EPA’s regulatory overreach and the War on Coal; (4) Improving domestic energy prosperity and security; and (5) Reducing the national deficit. Specific measures under AERA are outlined below:

REINS Act
- The REINS Actis proposed legislation that would require Congress and the President to vote on any EPA regulation that will have a negative impact on jobs.
- The REINS Act would allow for an open discussion on the potential impact on jobs of proposed EPA regulations prior to passage.
Empowering the states to regulate energy production
- Each state would be empowered to regulate and benefit from its own hydraulic fracturing – as opposed to the Federal government restricting a state’s ability to control its own resources and the resulting benefits.
- Provide states the option of leasing, permitting and regulating energy resources on federal lands within their borders.
Rein in out of control EPA
- Exclude greenhouse gases from regulation by the EPA and other federal agencies
- Repeal of the Renewable Fuel Standard
Improving Domestic Energy Prosperity and Independence
- Streamline the permitting process for upgrading and building new refineries
- Approve and allow the private sector to build the Keystone pipeline
- Remove barriers to developing and approving national pipelines and cross-border energy infrastructure
- Increase energy development on federal land
- Expand LNG exports by facilitating permits, ending the crude oil export ban, and preventing excessively broad environmental review of coal export terminals
Reducing the national deficit
- Creation of the “Debt Freedom Fund” – which would direct all additional revenues generated by exploration and drilling on federal lands (excluding the share allocated to the states) exclusively to national debt reduction

The AERA would not only create jobs, enhance American energy independence, reduce trade barriers, but would allow America to reach its full energy potential. In stark contrast, the President and the EPA have consistently killed jobs through onerous EPA regulations and their continued opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline. Federal overregulation of the economy has stifled America’s quest for domestic energy independence by unnecessarily locking up key energy reserves.

Sen. Cruz’s American Renaissance Act would breathe new life into America’s economy and begin to undue the failed energy policies of the Obama Administration and the EPA.

https://www.atr.org/sen-cruzs-legislation-harnesses-americas-energy-a8145

7. And Then There’s Agenda 21

Among the conspiracy theory elite there is only one supreme and all-encompassing doctrine of apocalyptic disaster: Agenda 21 [12]. The furor over this initiative dates back to the John Birch Society. In reality it is just a UN guide to sustainable environments that recommends some completely voluntary measures aimed at advancing smart growth and safer, more livable communities. It was adopted by 178 countries and signed for the U.S. by President George H.W. Bush. It was, however, never ratified by the senate.

Somehow this benign project was transformed in the minds of conservative mythmakers into a monstrously evil plot to steal the liberty of all mankind. Glenn Beck even wrote a book [13] describing it as “centralized control over all of human life on planet earth.” But the panic doesn’t stop there. Multiple state resolutions banning its implementation with a foreboding tenor have been enacted. For example, Tennessee’s resolution condemned its “destructive and insidious nature” and began by saying…

“WHEREAS, the United Nations Agenda 21 is a comprehensive plan of extreme environmentalism, social engineering, and global political control that was initiated at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development…”

That’s fairly typical of the numerous legislative measures aimed at defending America from a tyrannical, global, one-world government, orchestrated by despotic environmentalists and the liberal media. And we might as well throw in George Soros because that’s who freshman senator Ted Cruz of Texas believes [14] is responsible for the whole affair. Cruz has promised that he will “…continue leading the fight, to stop Agenda 21 and any other globalist plan that tries to subvert the U.S. Constitution and the liberties we all cherish as Americans.”

These delusional and thoroughly discredited inventions from the paranoia factories of Glenn Beck, Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, etc., were once the province of the radio backwoods and militia ham operators. And as frightening as these grim fairy tales are, what’s truly scary is that this conspiratorial fiction is now being embraced by elected officials in Washington and state houses across the country.

*See more stories tagged with:

conspiracy theory [15],

threat [16],

rush limbaugh [17],

agenda 21 [18]

---

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/media/7-weirdest-conspiracy-theories-now-taken-seriously-gop

===

an 8 24

Colin Allred says Ted Cruz 'hid in a supply closet' while Jan. 6 rioters stormed the Capitol

===

hedges: U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz—whose father is Rafael Cruz, a rabid right-wing Christian preacher and the director of the Purifying Fire International ministry—and legions of the senator’s wealthy supporters, some of whom orchestrated the shutdown, are rooted in a radical Christian ideology known asDominionism or Christian Reconstructionism. This ideology calls on anointed “Christian” leaders to take over the state and make the goals and laws of the nation “biblical.” It seeks to reduce government to organizing little more than defense, internal security and the protection of property rights. It fuses with the Christian religion the iconography and language of American imperialism and nationalism, along with the cruelest aspects of corporate capitalism. The intellectual and moral hollowness of the ideology, its flagrant distortion and misuse of the Bible, the contradictions that abound within it—its leaders champion small government and a large military, as if the military is not part of government—and its laughable pseudoscience are impervious to reason and fact. And that is why the movement is dangerous.

The cult of masculinity, as in all fascist movements, pervades the ideology of the Christian right. The movement uses religion to sanctify military and heroic “virtues,” glorify blind obedience and order over reason and conscience, and pander to the euphoria of collective emotions. Feminism and homosexuality, believers are told, have rendered the American male physically and spiritually impotent. Jesus, for the Christian right, is a man of action, casting out demons, battling the Antichrist, attacking hypocrites and ultimately slaying nonbelievers. This cult of masculinity, with its glorification of violence, is appealing to the powerless. It stokes the anger of many Americans, mostly white and economically disadvantaged, and encourages them to lash back at those who, they are told, seek to destroy them. The paranoia about the outside world is fostered by bizarre conspiracy theories, many of which are prominent in the rhetoric of those leading the government shutdown. Believers, especially now, are called to a perpetual state of war with the “secular humanist” state. The march, they believe, is irreversible. Global war, even nuclear war, is the joyful harbinger of the Second Coming. And leading the avenging armies is an angry, violent Messiah who dooms billions of apostates to death.

Dominionists believe they are engaged in an epic battle against the forces of Satan. They live in a binary world of black and white. They feel they are victims, surrounded by sinister groups bent on their destruction.They have anointed themselves as agents of God who alone know God’s will. They sanctify their rage. This rage lies at the center of the ideology. It leaves them sputtering inanities about Barack Obama, his corporate-sponsored health care reform bill, his alleged mandated suicide counseling or “death panels” for seniors under the bill, his supposed secret alliance with radical Muslims, and “creeping socialism.” They see the government bureaucracy as being controlled by “secular humanists” who want to destroy the family and make war against the purity of their belief system. They seek total cultural and political domination.

in gop convention said Fr tortured , implying by commies, but fought w/ Castro and che

===

said UN is coming for golf, hwy and pasture agenda 21 DN; no real pol diff from incumbent he flanked. Freedomworks, Heritage , other PACs; dereg (cf wayne slater on rove)

===

https://www.atr.org/sen-cruzs-legislation-harnesses-americas-energy-a8145

“The government will not solve our economic problems by controlling the economy or placing bureaucratic barriers to growth. The only thing that it must do is what it did in the Ronald Reagan era: get out of our way and let Americans do what they do best: dream, innovate, and prosper.”

REINS Act
- The REINS Actis proposed legislation that would require Congress and the President to vote on any EPA regulation that will have a negative impact on jobs.
- The REINS Act would allow for an open discussion on the potential impact on jobs of proposed EPA regulations prior to passage.
Empowering the states to regulate energy production
- Each state would be empowered to regulate and benefit from its own hydraulic fracturing – as opposed to the Federal government restricting a state’s ability to control its own resources and the resulting benefits.
- Provide states the option of leasing, permitting and regulating energy resources on federal lands within their borders.
Rein in out of control EPA
- Exclude greenhouse gases from regulation by the EPA and other federal agencies
- Repeal of the Renewable Fuel Standard
Improving Domestic Energy Prosperity and Independence
- Streamline the permitting process for upgrading and building new refineries
- Approve and allow the private sector to build the Keystone pipeline
- Remove barriers to developing and approving national pipelines and cross-border energy infrastructure
- Increase energy development on federal land
- Expand LNG exports by facilitating permits, ending the crude oil export ban, and preventing excessively broad environmental review of coal export terminals
Reducing the national deficit
- Creation of the “Debt Freedom Fund” – which would direct all additional revenues generated by exploration and drilling on federal lands (excluding the share allocated to the states) exclusively to national debt reduction

Sen. Cruz’s American Renaissance Act would breathe new life into America’s economy and begin to undue the failed energy policies of the Obama Administration and the EPA.

Ted Cruz, Tea Party’s new Latino hero, is a bit loony on green issues

By Lisa Hymas

After triumphing in the Republican primary in Texas last week, Tea Party It Boy Ted Cruz is virtually assured of winning a Senate seat in November. Unlike most of his Tea Party compatriots, he’s widely considered to be super-smart, one of the right’s leading legal minds. Conservatives are even embracing him as (gasp!) an “intellectual” — a label usually only deployed to heap scorn on scientists and other egg-headed freedom-killers.

But for a guy who’s so smart, Cruz has some truly stupid views.

On Glenn Beck’s radio show earlier this year, he said: “The federal government’s already shown that they believe they can control every aspect of our life. I mean, right now Congress is trying to tell us what kind oflight bulbsto buy and what kind of toilets. Right now you are prevented from buying a toilet that actually flushes because the bureaucrats in Washington know better than you do.”

That old lavatory lament? Clearly Cruz hasn’t been keeping up with the latest in toilet R&D.

Cruz is cray-cray on Agenda 21, totally buying into the right-wing conspiracy theory. Agenda 21 is a two-decade-old, non-binding U.N. document that calls in general terms for things like improving living standards and protecting ecosystems; it was almost universally forgotten until American ‘wingers glommed onto it a couple of years ago. Cruz claims that George Soros is behind the whole nefarious plot and that “Agenda 21 attempts to abolish ‘unsustainable’ environments, including golf courses, grazing pastures, and paved roads. It hopes to leave mother earth’s surface unscratched by mankind. … Agenda 21 subverts liberty, our property rights, and our sovereignty.”

Cruz also, like many of his fellow Republicans, frequently spreads misinformation on environmental issues — particularly if it benefits the oil and gas biz. Cruz literally owes his existence to Big Oil: His parents met at an oil-exploration company and went on to start a business that processed seismic data for oil companies, and he seems to have inherited their affection for the industry.

Cruz has called for fast-tracking the Keystone XL pipeline, claiming (erroneously) that it would “create tens of thousands of jobs.” He says Obama’s refusal to rubber-stamp the Keystone plan “hurt the environment, by ensuring that we will continue to import more and more of our oil from overseas on tankers that inevitably suffer the risk of spills.” Apparently he hasn’t heard that pipelines spill too — right on American soil, no less — and that under Obama the U.S. is importing less oil than at any time in the last 16 years. Cruz also boasts on his website that he “helped lead the fight” against the offshore drilling moratorium put in place by the Obama administration after the BP oil spill.

Step No. 2 of Cruz’s 12-step economic plan is “Kill Cap and Trade.” He seems to have missed the two-year-old news that it already died. He claims (erroneously) that a cap-and-trade system “would take thousands of dollars from every family in America.” And he claims (erroneously) that the EPA is still trying to foist it on America “by adopting back-door regulations.”

Step No. 5 of Cruz’s economic plan is “Restrain Abusive Environmental Enforcement.” He explains the need for this plank by claiming (erroneously) that the Obama administration is trying to ban fracking.

And he seems to think the Endangered Species Act is a vast conspiracy designed to cripple capitalism as we know it. He writes, “Currently, the Obama Administration is using the alleged presence of a lizard to try to stop oil and gas exploration in West Texas.” (Here’s more on that dastardly lizard.) And Cruz proudly notes on his website that he has defended property developers threatened by the dreaded arroyo toad.

Cruz may have gone to Harvard Law School and clerked for the Supreme Court, but on environmental issues, he sounds about as intellectual as Sarah Palin.

===

Cruz was born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, where his parents, Eleanor Darragh and Rafael Cruz, were working in the petroleum business.^[1][6] His father was a Cuban immigrant to the U.S. His mother was American, and was raised in Delaware, in a family of Irish and Italian descent.^[6][7] His father was imprisoned and tortured in Cuba by the Batista regime until he escaped to freedom in Texas in 1957.^[8]

Cruz attended high school at Faith West Academy in Katy, Texas,^[9] and then graduated from Second Baptist High School in Houston.

Cruz earned his Bachelor of Arts from Princeton University and his J.D., magna cum laude, from Harvard Law School. He was an editor of the Harvard Law Review, an executive editor of the Harvard Journal of Law & Public Policy, and a founding editor of the Harvard Latino Law Review.^[10] While at Princeton, he competed for the American Whig-Cliosophic Society's Debate Panel as one of North America's top-ranked parliamentary debaters, winning the top speaker award at both the 1992 U.S. National Debating Championship and the 1992 North American Debating Championship.^[11] In 1992, he was named Speaker of the Year and Team of the Year (with his debate partner, David Panton) by the American Parliamentary Debate Association.^[11] In 1991 he and his partner came in second to Austan Goolsbee and partner David Gray. Cruz was also a semi-finalist at the 1995 World Universities Debating Championship.^[12]

Legal career

Cruz also served as a law clerk to William Rehnquist, Chief Justice of the United States, and J. Michael Luttig of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.^[13] Cruz was the first Hispanic ever to clerk for a Chief Justice of the United States.^[14]

Cruz has authored more than 80 briefs before the United States Supreme Court and presented 43 oral arguments, including nine before the United States Supreme Court.

In the landmark case of District of Columbia v. Heller, Cruz assembled a coalition of thirty-one states in defense of the principle that the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution guarantees an individual right to keep and bear arms.^[15] Cruz also presented oral argument for the amici states in the companion case to Heller before the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.

In addition to his victory in Heller, Cruz has successfully defended the Ten Commandments monument on the Texas State Capitol grounds, the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools and the 2003 Texas redistricting plan.^[16]

Cruz also successfully defended, in Medellin v. Texas, the State of Texas against an attempt by the International Court of Justice to re-open the criminal convictions of 51 murderers on death row throughout the United States.^[17]

2012 U.S. Senate election

Main article: United States Senate election in Texas, 2012

On January 19, 2011, following an announcement that U.S. Senator Hutchison would not seek reelection, Cruz announced via blogger conference call his candidacy for the position.^[4] Cruz faced opposition from sitting Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst in the Republican senatorial primary. He won the Republican nomination runoff on July 31, 2012. ^[18] He will face Democratic nominee Paul Sadler in the general election.

Cruz has been endorsed by David Barton, founder and president of WallBuilders;^[19] the Club for Growth, a conservative political action committee;^[20] Erick Erickson, editor of prominent conservative blog RedState;^[21] the FreedomWorks for America super PAC;^[22] Princeton University professor Robert P. George;^[23] nationally syndicated radio host Mark Levin;^[24] former Attorney General Edwin Meese;^[25] Tea Party Express;^[26] Young Conservatives of Texas;^[27] and U.S. Senators Jim DeMint,^[28] Mike Lee,^[29] Rand Paul,^[30] and Pat Toomey.^[31] He has also been endorsed by former Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, Texas Congressman Ron Paul^[32], Michigan Congressman Justin Amash^[33], and former-U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania Rick Santorum.^[34]

^...

"America's Leading Lawyers for Business," Chambers USA (2009 & 2010)
"50 Most Influential Minority Lawyers in America," National Law Journal (2008)
"25 Greatest Texas Lawyers of the Past Quarter Century," Texas Lawyer (2010)
"20 Young Hispanic Americans on the Rise," Newsweek (1999)
Traphagen Distinguished Alumnus, Harvard Law School
Primary Editor, Harvard Law Review
Executive Editor, Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy
Founding Editor, Harvard Latino Law Review
John M. Olin Fellow in Law and Economics, Harvard Law School

NYT

...

Rafael Edward Cruz was born on Dec. 22, 1970, in Calgary, Alberta, where his parents worked in the oil business.

Mr. Cruz’s parents are central to the personal narrative he tells, how he got so devoted to his conservative brand of freedom. His father, also Rafael, now a Baptist pastor, fled Cuba in 1957 with $100 sewn into his underwear and worked his way through the University of Texas. His mother, Eleanor, was the first in her family to finish college, at Rice, and ran an energy company. They returned to Texas when he was a child, and he graduated from a Baptist high school in Houston.

His father told him as a child, Mr. Cruz often says, that “if we lose our freedom here, where do we go?”

Tuesday night, Mr. Cruz was joined on the victory stand by his parents, his wife and two small, blond daughters who held their hands over their ears as the large crowd cheered wildly.

Mr. Cruz tends to spend any spare time with his daughters, said his friend Kelly Shackelford, president of the Liberty Institute, an evangelical Christian legal group based in Texas.

Mr. Cruz worked in private law practice in the late 1990s and then began his turn into politics, working on the presidential campaign of George W. Bush and then working at the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department.

In 2003 he returned to Texas as solicitor general, giving him a direct chance to press for his ideals in the courts.

Mr. Cruz argued before the :{Supreme Court}: nine times and has trumpeted his successes. In his most notable victory, the court affirmed the right of Texas to ignore instructions from the International Court of Justice and the Bush administration to :{review an illegal immigrant’s death sentence}:.

He also helped argue that Texas could have a monument to the Ten Commandments at the Capitol, and keep the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. But critics say that in the campaign he took too much credit for his own role in those cases, which are red meat for his evangelical supporters. Since 2008 he has worked in aprivate law firm here, Morgan Lewis, often representing corporate clients.

In the runoff campaign, Mr. Cruz scorched his opponent with charges that he was a conciliator, too quick to compromise. But Mr. Cruz has yet to grapple with the seemingly impossible choices faced by Congress as it seeks to balance the budget without gutting Medicare or Social Security, for example.

In the last few days of the campaign — perhaps in a last-minute effort to attract mainstream Republicans, or perhaps in a preview of the tasks ahead — Mr. Cruz sounded a bit more conciliatory himself, suddenly talking about “reaching across the aisle.”

In a brief interview on Tuesday, he said that his role model in this respect was Ronald Reagan. “President Reagan stood for conservative principles in a way that brought people together,” he said.

Republicans have too often had it backward, he said, “making hateful attacks but then compromising on basic principle.”

“But I am not willing to compromise on allowing the government to keep growing and expanding our debt,” he said.

http://grist.org/politics/ted-cruz-tea-partys-new-latino-hero-is-a-bit-loony-on-green-issues/

lots of $ from lobbyists and fedsoc

http://www.campaignmoney.com/individual.asp?pg=13&cycle=12&candidateID=S2TX00312&statename=Virginia&statecode=VA&cname=WOOD%2C+JOHN&prevpage=18

http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/cruz_ted

Sen. Ted Cruz is a “Tea Party” Republican from Texas who was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 2012. An aggressive proponent of conservative principles and the son of a Cuban emigrant, Cruz has been likened by at least one Republican admirer to a “Republican Barack Obama.”[[1]](http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/cruz_ted#_edn1) Elected with the support of Tea Party-aligned groups like FreedomWorks and the Club for Growth—as well as major "pro-Israel" donor Sheldon Adelson, who reportedly gave some $250,000 to a group backing Cruz's candidacy[[2]](http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/cruz_ted#_edn2)—Cruz has been described as the Tea Party’s “ambassador” to the GOP Senate leadership, which Cruz joined in 2012 as a vice-chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee.[[3]](http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/cruz_ted#_edn3)

Despite his domestic platform promoting “limited” government, Cruz has given strong indications that he sympathizes with an interventionist, neoconservative-leaning view of U.S. power abroad. In a 2012 campaign statement, Cruz wrote that “Iran and North Korea present perhaps the greatest danger in the modern world, specifically nuclear weapons (and the threat of nuclear weapons) in the hands of two of the world’s most murderous regimes. We must pursue all means necessary to contain that threat. International sanctions should continue to pressure the Iranian and North Korean elites to decide it’s in their best interests to abandon nuclear weapons—and, ideally, overthrow their current regimes. In the meantime, Iran and North Korea must understand they face a threat of overwhelming force if we see any evidence that they might pass nuclear weapons on to terrorists or threaten us with nuclear blackmail.”[[4]](http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/cruz_ted#_edn4)

Declaring that Cruz was mostly “reading from the interventionist script,” Daniel Larison observed: “It isn’t clear how Cruz reconciles his goal of U.S.-sponsored regime change in both countries with an effort to persuade these regimes that they should not have a nuclear deterrent. … If Cruz is going to promote the cause of limited government, it appears that this will not extend to the government’s activities overseas.”[[5]](http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/cruz_ted#_edn5)

Cruz has also expressed strong support for a “pro-Israel” foreign policy. Shortly after taking office in January 2013, Cruz visited Afghanistan and Israel as part of a Senate Republican delegation. Meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—who called Cruz “a friend of Israel”—Cruz declared, “In my view the United States should stand unshakably alongside the Nation of Israel.”[[6]](http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/cruz_ted#_edn6)

A New McCarthy?

Cruz has been heavily criticized for mischaracterizing of his opponents’ views and making outlandish accusations. In February 2013, the New Yorker reported that at an Americans for Prosperity event in 2010, Cruz claimed that the faculty of Harvard Law School, which he attended from 1992 to 1995, contained at least 12 members ”who would say they were Marxists who believed in the Communists overthrowing the United States government.”[[7]](http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/cruz_ted#_edn7) Cruz was apparently referring to a group of Marxist-inspired professors who advocate "Critical Legal Studies," or the notion that "law ends up reflecting the will and the interests of the powerful," according to Think Progress' Zack Beauchamp.[[8]](http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/cruz_ted#_edn8)

Cruz's assessment was dismissed by Charles Fried, a Republican law professor who taught Cruz at Harvard. Fried complained that Cruz's remark "lacks nuance" and "misunderstands what [the CLS professors] were about."[[9]](http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/cruz_ted#_edn9) Nonetheless, a spokesperson for Cruz doubled down on his assertion, calling the "substantive point" about Marxists in the faculty "absolutely correct."[[10]](http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/cruz_ted#_edn10)

Several commentators likened Cruz's charges to McCarthyism, with some suggesting that Cruz's inflammatory rhetoric could hurt the GOP's efforts to rebrand itself after its poor showing in the 2012 elections. "Cruz is now positioned as a major obstacle to the ideological modernization that the Republican Party is desperately in need of," wrote Salon's Steve Kornacki. "If his brand of conservatism is treated as the gold standard of purity by the conservative media and conservative activists, Republican leaders will have a hard time moving the party away from its Obama-era orthodoxy."[[11]](http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/cruz_ted#_edn11)

Cruz attracted similar attention for his questioning of Chuck Hagel during the future Defense Secretary's confirmation hearings in early 2013. Highlighting a 2009 appearance Hagel had made on an Al Jazeera English call-in show, Cruz attempted to link Hagel to remarks made by one of the show’s callers referring to the United States as “the world’s bully.” Hagel, Cruz alleged, had appeared on “a foreign network broadcasting propaganda to nations that are hostile to us” and “explicitly agree[d] with the characterization of the United States as the world's bully. I would suggest is not the conduct one would expect of a secretary of defense."[[12]](http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/cruz_ted#_edn12)

Cruz also insinuated that Hagel had publicly accused Israel of committing war crimes in Gaza and “sickening slaughter” in Lebanon, highlighting clips that observers said were taken out of context. “Judged kindly,” wrote blogger Zack Beauchamp, “Cruz’s performance in each of these two hearings was aggressively inaccurate. Judged more harshly (and accurately), it was mendacious demagoguery at its finest. … [I]f you want to know why the Republican Party will remain broken for the foreseeable future, go watch the Ted Cruz game tape from this week.”[[13]](http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/cruz_ted#_edn13)

Subsequently, Cruz successfully pressured the Senate Armed Services Committee to delay a vote on advancing Hagel’s nomination by circulating a letter, signed by 25 Senate Republicans, demanding further information from Hagel before they would allow a vote. The Daily Beast’s Ali Gharib reported that “the Republicans' requests go far beyond the scope of Hagel's personal finances and records, varying between asking him for materials that don't exist or that would violate legal agreements to release.” Gharib quoted congressional procedures expert Norm Ornstein, a political scientist based at the American Enterprise Institute, who complained that “this goes even beyond the intrusive questionnaires candidates fill out during the vetting process. … That a Freshman senator would ask for that level of information says more about Ted Cruz than about anything else. I’ve never heard of anything like that before.”[[14]](http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/cruz_ted#_edn14)

The Senate eventually voted to confirm Hagel, but not before Cruz had also insinuated that the nominee may have taken money from Saudi Arabia or North Korea, a remark for which the senator was widely ridiculed.[[15]](http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/cruz_ted#_edn15)

Views and Trajectory

A 2012 Mother Jones profile of Cruz described the senator’s views as “an amalgam of far-right dogmas,” including “a Paulian distaste for international law; a Huckabee-esque strain of Christian conservatism; and a [Rick] Perry-like reverence for the 10th Amendment, which he believes grants the states all powers not explicitly outlined in the Constitution while severely curtailing the federal government's authority to infringe on them. Toss in a dose of fictional [Republican sitcom character] Alex P. Keaton and a dash of Cold War nostalgia, and you've got a tea party torch carrier the establishment can embrace.”[[16]](http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/cruz_ted#_edn16)

Before joining the Senate, Cruz served as solicitor general for the state of Texas, during which time he argued several cases before the U.S. Supreme Court. “Of Cruz's eight oral arguments before the Supreme Court on behalf of Texas,” Mother Jonesreported, “five involved the death penalty, with Cruz arguing, at various points, that Texas should be allowed to execute the mentally ill, a Mexican national who hadn't been informed of his Vienna Convention right to speak to his consulate, and a man who raped his stepdaughter.”[[17]](http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/cruz_ted#_edn17) In one case, Medellin vs. Texas, Cruz successfully fought an attempt by the International Court of Justice to reopen the cases of 51 convicts on the U.S. death row, which Cruz touted on his website as a defense of “U.S. sovereignty against the UN and the World Court.”[[18]](http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/cruz_ted#_edn18)

Cruz has also boasted of defending the inclusion of the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance recited by schoolchildren and preserving a Ten Commandments display on public property.[[19]](http://www.rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/cruz_ted#_edn19)

Cruz’s resumes includes serving as a clerk for former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court William Rehnquist, a domestic policy adviser to the 2000 George W. Bush campaign, an associate deputy attorney general under John Ashcroft, and as a director of policy planning at the Federal Trade Commission.