A Tea Party Intellect From Texas, Poised to Join the Senate
By ERIK ECKHOLM
HOUSTON — As a teenager, Ted Cruz was an intense and eloquent parser of free-market economics, dazzling Rotary Clubs here in Houston by reciting the Constitution. At Princeton, he was a national champion debater and an intellectual leader of a band of conservative students. He was a star at Harvard Law School and clerked for the chief justice of the United States.
But few may have imagined Mr. Cruz, 41, in his newest role, as the Tea Party favorite and Republican candidate for the United States Senate, trading verbal orchids with the likes of Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck. Mr. Cruz earned the nomination on Tuesday in a runoff election after more than a year of sweaty street campaigning, drawing national attention for beating Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, the more experienced nominee of the Texas Republican establishment.
“I’d have predicted that he would be a professor, not a politician,” said Robert P. George, Mr. Cruz’s adviser at Princeton in the early 1990s. Professor George, a noted social conservative, said that Mr. Cruz stood out even among his Ivy League peers as “intellectually and morally serious,” writing his thesis on the separation of powers.
“But he’s certainly not a shrinking violet,” Mr. George quickly added in an interview Tuesday — to which, Mr. Dewhurst, a wealthy conservative who had the support of Gov. Rick Perry, can attest.
Mr. Cruz’s victory in November is all but assured in this heavily Republican state and marks a shift to the right in the already-conservative party here. Political elders and experts who have watched him during his time here as state solicitor general and on the campaign trail predict that he will be an intellectual force in the Congress on behalf of Constitutional limits on federal power. He is expected to join Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina and other Tea Party icons as an uncompromising irritant of mainstream Republicans and Democrats alike.
It helps, of course, that Mr. Cruz has the smooth good looks and practiced speech of a television host and is able to channel his knowledge into sound bites.
“He has the potential to be a national figure,” said Mark P. Jones, a political scientist at Rice University, noting Mr. Cruz’s intellect and oratorical skills.
“He’ll be a senator from the second-largest state in the nation,” Mr. Jones said, “and he’s very good on television, a perfectly designed politician for today’s 24-hour news cycle.”
Speaking to the Values Voters Summit in Washington in October, Mr. Cruz drew a standing ovation as he repeated the themes of the political and religious right, sometimes sounding more ideologue than intellectual. He called President Obama the country’s “most radical president,” railed against the “gay rights agenda” and warned against new threats to “religious liberty.” Within days, National Review anointed him “the next great conservative hope.”
On Tuesday, as he greeted supporters in sweltering heat outside a polling station, Mr. Cruz and his wife, Heidi, were picture-perfect, not a wrinkle on their clothes nor a hair out of place.
Mr. Cruz said that his first dive into electoral politics had left him feeling “invigorated and inspired.”
“Every day, I come home with a spring in my step,” he said to the wildly enthusiastic group of grass-roots volunteers and to the cameras. “We’ve got to work together to stop the Obama agenda and take this country back.”
Rafael Edward Cruz was born on Dec. 22, 1970 in Calgary, Canada, 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, now a Baptist pastor, fled from 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 wildly cheered their father.
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 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 a private 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 dilemmas 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.
h/t lindybill
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Cruz previously served as the director of the Office of Policy Planning at the Federal Trade Commission, an Associate Deputy Attorney General at the United States Department of Justice, and as Domestic Policy Advisor to U.S. President George W. Bush on the 2000 Bush- Cheney campaign. In addition, from 2004 to 2009 Cruz was an Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Texas School of Law in Austin, where he taught U.S. Supreme Court litigation.
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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] Cruz was also a semi-finalist at the 1995 World Universities Debating Championship
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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.
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