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Inside Ted Cruzs Last
The Texas senators effort alienated some allies and sparked questions about ties to John Eastman, a longtime friend and author of key legal memos in Trumps efforts.
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Sen. Ted Cruz was dining near the Capitol on the evening of Dec. 8, 2020, when he received an urgent call from President Donald Trump. A lawsuit had just been filed at the Supreme Court designed to overturn the election Trump had lost, and the president wanted help from the Texas Republican.
Would you be willing to argue the case? Trump asked Cruz, as the senator later recalled it.
Sure, Id be happy to if the court granted a hearing, Cruz said he responded.
The call was just one step in a collaboration that for two months turned the once-bitter political enemies into close allies in the effort to keep Trump in the White House based on the presidents false claims about a stolen election. By Cruzs own account, he was leading the charge to prevent the certification of Joe Biden as president.
Now, Cruzs efforts are of interest to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, in particular whether Cruz was in contact with Trump lawyer John Eastman, a conservative attorney who has been his friend for decades and who wrote key legal memos aimed at denying Bidens victory.
Ted Cruz Begins His Book With A Very Misleading Story In Which He Argues That Most Of His Republican Senate Colleagues Are Mendacious Sellouts
In the introduction to his book, Cruz narrates the events of a private Senate Republican strategy lunch on February 11, 2014 a day when, in Cruz’s telling, his colleagues heaped “rage,” “venom,” and “animosity” on him because he had committed “the cardinal sin in Washington, D.C.: telling the truth.”
The issue at hand was the debt ceiling, which needed to be raised. So, according to Cruz, GOP Senate leaders announced that they planned to do two things. First, they’d offer a “clean” bill increasing the debt ceiling, rather than trying to play hardball with Obama and the Democrats by advancing conservative policy priorities. And second, they asked Republicans to consent to let this bill pass with a pure up-or-down vote which would let Democrats, who controlled 55 seats, pay the political price for the increase. Cruz writes:
Cruz argued that instead, Senate Republicans should use this “leverage” and demand policy concessions from Obama in exchange for raising the debt ceiling. After that, he writes, “the yelling began.” The other senators were furious that he had the “temerity” to screw up their “brilliant maneuver to increase our debt without any fingerprints.” They argued that because of his objection, at least five Republicans would have to vote to increase the debt ceiling, and one senator asked him, “Why do you want to throw five Republicans under the bus?”
“All Im asking,” Cruz says he responded, “is that you actually do what you told the voters you would do.”
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Government Shutdown Of 2013
Ted Cruz’s Obamacare filibuster
Cruz had a leading role in the 2013 United States federal government shutdown. Cruz gave a 21-hour Senate speech in an effort to hold up a federal budget bill and thereby defund the Affordable Care Act. Cruz persuaded the House of Representatives and House Speaker John Boehner to include an ACA defunding provision in the bill. In the U.S. Senate, former Majority Leader Harry Reid blocked the filibuster attempt because only 18 Republican Senators supported the filibuster. During the filibuster he read Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss. To supporters, the move “signaled the depth of Cruz’s commitment to rein in government”. This move was extremely popular among Cruz supporters, with Rick Manning of Americans for Limited Government naming Cruz “2013 Person of the Year” in an op-ed in The Hill, primarily for his filibuster against the Affordable Care Act. Cruz was also named “2013 Man of the Year” by conservative publications TheBlaze, and The American Spectator, “2013 Conservative of the Year” by Townhall, and “2013 Statesman of the Year” by the Republican Party of Sarasota County, Florida. He was a finalist for Time magazine’s “Person of the Year” in 2013. To critics, including some Republican colleagues such as Senator Lindsey Graham, the move was ineffective.
Cruz has consistently denied any involvement in the 2013 government shutdown, even though he cast several votes to prolong it and was blamed by many within his own party for prompting it.
Mccain Isn’t The Only One Who Had Scathing Words For The Senator Former Speaker Of The House John Boehner Once Described Cruz As Lucifer In The Flesh And Sen Lindsey Graham Once Said: If You Killed Ted Cruz On The Floor Of The Senate And The Trial Was In The Senate Nobody Would Convict You
Jason Johnson
In the best-known part of the speech, he read Dr. Seuss’s “Green Eggs and Ham” as a bedtime story to his two young daughters watching in Houston. Heidi suggested he read the book.
In his speech, he repeated an analogy between the “oppression” of Obamacare and the oppression that his father, Rafael, faced as a young man in Cuba.
Cruz’s infamous speech was one of the longest Senate performances ever, stopping after 21 hours 19 minutes.
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Does Anyone Like Mr Cruz
David Panton, a Jamaican who was Mr Cruz’s debate partner at university, does. They became the champion college debaters in the United States.
Mr Panton recently gave the Jamaica Observer a glowing account of his old friend. “He is the most brilliant person I know,” Mr Panton said. “Unlike the media portrayal of him as a firebrand Ted is one of the kindest and most caring people. He cares deeply about other people and making a difference in their lives, as he did in mine, as a loyal friend, strong supporter, and committed mentor.”
Mr Panton’s is not a widely shared view.
Cruz Was An Ambitious High
In his book, he wrote: “Midway through junior high school, I decided that I’d had enough of being the unpopular nerd. I remember sitting up one night asking a friend why I wasn’t one of the popular kids. I ended up staying up most of that night thinking about it. ‘Okay, well, what is it that the popular kids do? I will consciously emulate that,'” the Guardian reported.
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Cruz Has Consistently Called It A Terrorist Attack
Cruz, too, has been careful in how he describes the riots. On Thursday he tweeted that insurrection is a political term used by Democrats and the corporate media to slander every Trump voter across America.
Its transparent political theater, he wrote.
Cruz had repeatedly called it a terrorist attack before recanting Thursday.
What happened at the Capitol was a despicable act of terrorism, Cruz said in an interview with Hearst Newspapers two days after the riot. The violent criminals who attacked the Capitol should be fully prosecuted and they should go to jail for a very, very long time.
Cruz sparked the outrage this weekduring a Senate Rules Committee hearing with Capitol Police Chief Thomas Manger on Wednesday.
We are approaching a solemn anniversary this week and it is an anniversary of a violent terrorist attack on the Capitol, where we saw the men and women of law enforcement demonstrate incredible courage, incredible bravery, risk their lives to defend the men and women who serve in this Capitol, Cruz said.
ONE YEAR LATER: 64 Texans were charged in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. A year later, heres where things stand.
The blowback came as Cruz may be preparing for another presidential run a potential rematch with Trump, who beat Cruz for the Republican nomination in 2016. Cruz, who placed second in the 2016 primary, recently said he would run again in a heartbeat.
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There was a time, not so very long ago, when Ted Cruz pitched himself as the model of integrity, the very antithesis of the likes of Donald Trump.
Campaigning for the Republican Partys nomination in 2015 and 2016, he was an early favourite of many conservatives and pro-constitution Republicans.
He had enough support among evangelicals to bag Iowa, the very first state in the primary process, and to earn a brief word of congratulations from Trump, before Trump resorted to form and accused the Texas senator of stealing the race.
Later, as the race thinned and Cruz found himself fighting against Trump for his political life, he famously accused him of being a pathological liar, as the Republican frontrunner insulted the senators wife, and claimed his father was somehow involved in the assassination of John K Kennedy.
He is proud of being a serial philanderer, hissed Cruz. He describes his own battles with venereal diseases as his own personal Vietnam.
Trump then went on to win the Indiana primary, and Cruz dropped out of the race. Such was the bad blood, that Lyin Ted did not endorse Trump at that summers Republican convention, waiting until September before finally offering his support.
Since then, like a mountain stream in flood, Ted Cruz, 50, has changed course several times.
In 2018, the man who studied at Princeton University and Harvard Law School, wrote a profile of Trump for Time magazine, in which he heaped bountiful praise on him.
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At Princeton The Number Of People Who Disliked Mr Cruz Only Grew
Contemporaries at Princeton have described Mr Cruz as “arrogant” and “creepy”.
His first room-mate was Craig Mazin, who begged to be housed with someone else, anyone else.
Mr Mazin went on to become a Hollywood screenwriter, writing The Hangover Part II and The Hangover Part III. It is fair to say he does not have fond memories of his student room-mate. When they first met, Mr Cruz was reading a book in Spanish called: “Was Karl Marx a Satanist?”
Mr Cruz appeared to have arrived at university with his views already fully formed, and to have changed little since then.
Mr Mazin said: “What you see before you now is exactly who he was back then. He does not change, the way zombies and mould don’t change.
“I want to be clear Ted Cruz is a nightmare of a human being. I have plenty of problems with his politics but, truthfully, his personality is so awful that 99 per cent of why I hate him is just his personality. If he agreed with me on every issue I would hate him only one percent less.”
Mr Cruz Went On To Work For George W Bushwho Didn’t Like Him
In his 20s the high-flying Mr Cruz became an adviser on domestic policy to George W Bush during his 2000 presidential campaign. He then served as an associate deputy attorney general in the Bush administration.
Did his boss like him? Not much. Mr Bush said recently: “I just don’t like the guy.”
Friends of the former president said he had found Mr Cruz to be “opportunistic” in criticising fellow Republicans for his own gain.
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Climate Change Energy Policy And Epa
Cruz rejects the scientific consensus on climate change. In January 2015, Cruz voted for a Senate amendment stating that climate change is real but voted against an amendment stating that climate change was real and that humans were significantly contributing to it. In a March 2015 interview with the Texas Tribune, Cruz called environmental advocates concerned “global warming alarmists” and said that they are “the equivalent of the flat-earthers.”
Cruz has said that “satellite data demonstrate that there has been no significant warming whatsoever for 17 years.” The Annenberg Public Policy Center‘s FactCheck.org stated that this was “misleading” and that “Cruz cherry-picks data to arrive at a spurious conclusion.” The Washington Post fact-checker said that this statement was “not correct” and a “highly misleading statement to the average viewer or reader.”
As chairman of the United States Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Space, Science and Competitiveness, Cruz has criticized NASA for conducting what he considers to be too much research on climate change and Earth science, stating that research into these fields are not part of the “core function of NASA.” FactCheck.org said that Cruz’s comments “made some misleading claims regarding the agency’s budgets and the science that it conducts” and noted that research into earth and atmospheric sciences has been fundamental to NASA’s mission since the agency’s inception.”
Cruz supported the U. S. withdrawal from the Paris agreement.
Early Life And Family
Rafael Edward Cruz was born on December 22, 1970, at Foothills Medical Centre in Calgary, Alberta, Canada, to Eleanor Elizabeth Wilson and Rafael Cruz. Cruz’s mother was born in Wilmington, Delaware. She is of three-quarters Irish and one-quarter Italian descent, and earned an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Rice University in the 1950s.
Cruz’s father, Rafael, was born and raised in Cuba, the son of a Canary Islander who immigrated to Cuba as a child. As a teenager in the 1950s, Rafael Cruz was beaten by agents of Fulgencio Batista for opposing the Batista regime. He left Cuba in 1957 to attend the University of Texas at Austin and obtained political asylum in the United States after his four-year student visa expired. He earned Canadian citizenship in 1973 and became a naturalized United States citizen in 2005.
At the time of his birth, Ted Cruz’s parents had lived in Calgary for three years and were working in the oil business as owners of a seismic-data processing firm for oil drilling. Cruz has said that he is the son of “two mathematicians/computer programmers”. In 1974, Cruz’s father left the family and moved to Texas. Later that year, Cruz’s parents reconciled and relocated the family to Houston. They divorced in 1997. Cruz has two older half-sisters, Miriam Ceferina Cruz and Roxana Lourdes Cruz, from his father’s first marriage. Miriam died in 2011.
Cruz began going by Ted at age 13.
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But Cruz And His Conservative Stances Stirred Up Debate Upon His Arrival In Washington Several Months After His Appointment He Was Famously Called Wacko Bird By The Late Sen John Mccain
In March 2013, McCain called Cruz and other Republicans “wacko birds” whose beliefs are not “reflective of the views of the majority of Republicans,” according to The Huffington Post
Cruz embraced the name and even keeps a black baseball cap with a picture of Daffy Duck next to the words “WACKO BIRD” in his Senate office, according to GQ Magazine.
: GQ Magazine, The Huffington Post
Ted Cruz Just Reminded The Republican Establishment Why They Hate Him
Business Reporter, HuffPost
Is Sen. Ted Cruz the palatable presidential alternative to Donald Trump? Sure, the Texan senators not exactly the Republican Party establishments first or even second choice, but the Jeb Bush and ships have sailed and sunk.
Many in the GOP hold similar sentiments to the Republican lobbyist Ed Rogers, who told CNN in December that “compared to Trump, he’s OK.”
But if you run a business, are employed by one, care about the stability of the financial system, or would prefer that the U.S. economy not be needlessly thrown into disarray — a group that seems like a pretty broad coalition of voters — Cruzs economic policy is not OK.
He told CNBC on Friday that he wants to push America back to the gold standard. This is a hare-brained policy that no other country uses and not a single surveyed economist thinks is a good idea. Under the gold standard, a dollar is worth a certain amount of gold.
Thats great, you might think: the value of the dollar will be stable. But the exact opposite is true gold is a commodity and its price, driven by supply and demand and speculation, swings wildly. Under the gold standard, a central bank like the Federal Reserve would have to raise and cut interest rates not based on how well the economy is doing, but whats going on in the gold market. Its a good way to run a modern economy into the ground.
And yet Cruz thinks the gold standard is a great policy.
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Return To Private Practice
After leaving the Solicitor General position in 2008, Cruz joined the Houston office of the Philadelphia-based law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, often representing corporate clients. At Morgan Lewis, he led the firm’s U.S. Supreme Court and national appellate litigation practice. In 2010, he abandoned a bid for state attorney general when incumbent Attorney General Greg Abbott, who hired Cruz as solicitor general, decided to run for reelection.
Cruz defended two record-setting $54-million personal injury awards in New Mexico at the appellate level, including one that a lower court had thrown out. He represented a mentally disabled man who was allegedly raped by an employee of the facility where he lived, and the family of a 78-year-old resident of an Albuquerque nursing home who died of internal bleeding. The settlements were sealed in both cases.
