In all fairness, his wife makes big bucks working for Goldman and was involved in the North American Union policy writing.
Cruz was an insider at the Bush white house before he morphed himself into an outsider.
Although the proposals in the paper are a mild call for general hemispheric economic cooperation with no formal structure, the conspiracy-inclined have interpreted it as a sinister conspiracy to destroy American sovereignty and combine us into a single union with Canada and Mexico. They are inherently suspicious of the Council on Foreign Relations, despite its repeated claims to be politically neutral and solely interested in studying issues objectively. It has become a lynchpin in globalist conspiracy theories and anything associated with it immediately looks more sinister in some eyes.
The paper is basically benign, pointing to ways that the nations of North America could work together through free markets and reducing trade barriers to spread more success and raise up the economies of the poorer countries. In its concluding section it says:
"North America is different from other regions of the world and must find its own cooperative route forward. A new North American community should rely more on the market and less on bureaucracy, more on pragmatic solutions to shared problems than on grand schemes of confederation or union, such as those in Europe. We must maintain respect for each other's national sovereignty."
Which certainly doesn't sound all that terrible, what with acknowledging how different North America is from Europe, promoting market solutions instead of government and explicitly rejecting the idea of a "confederation or union" while promoting respect for national sovereignty. It's almost like the conspiracy theorists never read the document, or gave up after the title and wrote a fantasy version in their heads based solely on the title and their obsession with the CFR.
Admittedly, there are plenty of bad ideas in the report. It's full of proposals for government managed trade and incentive programs and inter-governmental cooperation for regulation and security. It's all stuff which makes sense if you think government is the way to solve problems, but not something which would resonate with true conservatives. Yet the big irony here is that it appears that Heidi Cruz doesn't even agree with those aspects of the report for which she is being blamed.
Heidi Cruz' role in all of this was as one of a large panel of readers and her sole identifiable contribution to the project is a one-paragraph response in the final appendix in which she says:
"We must emphasize the imperative that economic investment be led and perpetuated by the private sector. There is no force proven like the market for aligning incentives, sourcing capital, and producing results like financial markets and profit-making businesses. This is simply necessary to sustain a higher living standard for the poorest among us - truly the measure of our success. As such, investment fundsand financing mechanisms should be deemed attractive instruments by those committing the capital and should only be developed in conjunction with market participants."
So basically, her role here is to say that free markets and free trade are the answer to greater regional prosperity. I find it hard to believe that any conservative or republican would disagree with this or condemn her for believing it, and it's positively bizarre to see someone who is as much of a globalist insider as Dewhurst raising this sort of argument.
The whole idea that Heidi Cruz is part of some grand conspiracy is patently ridiculous. It's guilt by association and by innuendo from people who don't understand the CFR or the report which they so revile and who assume that anyone who may have been in a room with Robert Pastor or William Weld must be some sort of globalist stooge. The reality is that the CFR draws on a diverse pool of experts, most of whom have very little involvement in the organization and that its output, like this paper, tends to be in the form of general suggestions with no force behind them which no one ever really acts on. We certainly aren't plunging headlong into any kind of regional union on the basis of one paper which no one seems to have read.