Swearing by the Constitution-Ted Cruz’s lodestone (Very long)

Weekly Standard ^ | 10/4/15 | Terry Eastland

[VinL]

Consider that in Republican Ted Cruz, the junior senator from Texas, we have a presidential candidate who during his high school years in Houston was among several students who met twice a week to read the Constitution and the Federalist Papers and the Anti-Federalist Papers and the even more obscure debates on ratification.

All of that while also memorizing the entire Constitution in shortened mnemonic form. Thus, in case you didn’t know (and Cruz still does), “TCC NCC PCC PAWN momma WReN” stands for the powers of Congress in Article I, section 8, of the Constitution: “taxes, credit, commerce, naturalization, coinage, counterfeiting, post office, copyright, courts, piracy, Army, war, Navy, militia, money for militia, Washington, D.C., rules and necessary and proper.”

Cruz....toured Texas, going to Rotary Clubs and other civic associations, where, from memory, they demonstrated their mastery of the Constitution. The nonprofit sponsoring the program paid them college scholarship money for each speech.

“It became a burning passion,” Cruz told me recently, adding that if he had been asked as a teenager what he wanted to do in life, defending the Constitution would have been at the top of the list. “I readily admit I was kind of a weird kid,” he said. If so, he was a weird kid who knew his Constitution.

It’s not surprising that in college (at Princeton) Cruz did his senior thesis on the Ninth and Tenth Amendments, or that, after earning his law degree from Harvard, he held jobs in which constitutional interpretation was often a daily undertaking—clerking for ... Rehnquist, serving five years as solicitor general of Texas..., and representing private clients in the federal courts, winning plaudits for his skillful advocacy. Now, not surprisingly, Cruz the presidential candidate has what might be called a constitutional agenda.

[VinL]

From the article:

"Cruz’s chance of winning the Republican nomination seems remote. But his candidacy is interesting because it tests whether voters agree with him about the country’s condition, the causes of that condition, and the proper medicine. A problem for Cruz may lie in the extent to which, in the minds of Americans, the Constitution of 1787, as amended, has been supplanted by the so-called living Constitution, its elasticity making possible the politics of “transformation” so assiduously practiced by Obama and the Democratic party. In this view, the government may do almost anything in the name of improving the lives of citizens..."

******************

OK article, but Mr. Eastland betrays his prejudice by virtue of his failure to include the DC GOP in that universe of adherents to the "living constitution".

[cripplecreek]

[highball]

This is the man we need in the White House; let’s all help put him there.

https://www.tedcruz.org/donate7/

[cripplecreek]

Why any conservative would even consider anyone else is beyond me.

[proust]

crickets... looks like people don’t want to line up for long lectures on the ratification process. Shocking.

[zeugma]

I would be interested in reading his senior thesis on the 9th and 10th amendments. Link anyone?

[mtrott]

I’m in!

[cripplecreek]

He had a great mentor.

[proust]

Many great mentors:

[cripplecreek]

He’s speaking in Kalamazoo Michigan tomorrow. I wish I had known earlier so I could have planned on getting over there.

[ProgressingAmerica]

I am fairly certain this is what you are looking for.

Ted Cruz’s 1992 Princeton Undergrad Thesis
https://archive.org/details/480888-cruz-thesis

[VinL]

Ted Cruz does appeal to those with higher intellects. I can understand that Cruz’s exegesis on the Constitution and the founding principles of the nation may be beyond the intellectual capacity of some.

[proust]

It’s sad that Cruz supporters need to pat themselves on the back.

It’s also a shame Cruz was unable to form a winning strategy even with that massive intellectual capacity of his.

[cripplecreek]

We can’t all be reality TV fans I guess.

[VinL]

It’s also a shame Cruz was unable to form a winning strategy

******************

He has a winning strategy!!!! Don’t you see it????? Oh, I’m sorry, you can’t see it, can you? I’d explain it, but some just can’t understand. Sorry.

UH, Go Donald, yer yuuge!

[right way right]

Don’t feed the troll.

[cripplecreek]

Trump is slipping as Cruz is creeping up. Most important is the fact that Ted Cruz continues to be the consensus favorite every month and is the candidate who benefits most from others dropping out.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-gop/3344268/posts

[HiTech RedNeck]

Well isn’t that the snoot approach?

Fault Donald for a thousand things, he does not talk down to you.

[Svartalfiar]

In his campaign book, A Time for Truth, Cruz writes, “For far too long, Congress has passed legislation with no one in the Senate once asking what should be the preliminary question: Do we have the constitutional authority to enact this bill?” A Cruz administration would press that question when necessary, and if it found such authority lacking, the legislation might receive a presidential veto.

EVERY bill should include, in it's forword/preface/summary/whatever, a quick section explaining how that bill is constitutional, with relevant citations. For how legally convoluted they make some of these bills, I think a little bit of legal research wouldn't be too difficult!

[cripplecreek]

Well isn’t that the snoot approach?

Well it was in response to a snide little troll.