Posted on 11/06/2014 6:08:34 PM PST by 2ndDivisionVet
Sen. Ted Cruz has already flexed his influence in the House with last year's government shutdown. Now, he'll be part of the Senate majority and presumed majority leader Mitch McConnell might have his hands full.
His dry humor on display, Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell began his victory press conference on Wednesday with insider playfulness that had outsized import.
The presumed soon-to-be leader of a GOP-controlled Senate started by briefly reviewing his takeaways from the election, including unhappiness with dysfunction in Washington. He then named some of the people who had called him that day: President Obama, Senate majority leader Harry Reid, House Speaker John Boehner. Pause. “And Ted Cruz, too.”
An understated smile crossed his face, and a few of the reporters chuckled at his inclusion of the fiery, tea party senator from Texas in this “A” list of power brokers. Senator Cruz can do serious damage to Senator McConnell’s stated intention to “work together” with the president on issues where they can agree. The unanswered question in Washington is: Will Cruz play the spoiler?
This is the senator who led the partial government shutdown over the Affordable Care Act last year. He meets regularly with House tea partyers, to the great annoyance of “establishment” Republicans in that chamber. Cruz is also eyeing the presidency and can be expected to draw sharp contrasts with the White House, as well as with moderate “establishment” Republicans....
(Excerpt) Read more at csmonitor.com ...
Different systems of learning. Apples and oranges.
And you need to read up on who wrote the finest design for a government- ever. That’s not done by simpletons.
There’s more to IQ than publicity.
I’m still buzzing from Tuesday and I think Cruz can handle Chief “double chin” handily. The Great OZ has spoken.
Ted Cruz’s filibuster was absolutely brilliant.
Yep. By forcing the Republicans last Nov to do what they said they would he saved their butts.
At least we can take a deep breath now and plan.
What a stupid question. Can Ted Cruz handle Mitch McConnell?
I am quite aware of who authored he Constitution.
I am also quite familiar with how IQ tests are constructed and what abilities they measure.
I bring up the point about Jefferson’s peculiar talent not just as a publicity stunt or a parlor trick, but rather as a demonstration of the fact that he possessed a rare gift, namely the ability to use both hemispheres of his brain independently and analytically.
This is an ability not measured by any standardized IQ test and one which is invaluable in terms of applying rigorous logic to any problem.
Ah! I see.
(I should clarify that I was referring to Jefferson’s ‘publicity’.)
Rafael Edward “Ted” Cruz (born December 22, 1970) is the junior United States Senator from Texas. Elected in 2012, he is the first Cuban American or Latino to hold the office of US Senator from Texas.[4][5][6][7] Cruz is a member of the Republican Party. He served as Solicitor General of Texas from 2003 to May 2008, after being appointed by Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott.[2] Between 1999 and 2003, Cruz 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. Cruz was also an Adjunct Professor of Law at the University of Texas School of Law in Austin, where he taught U.S. Supreme Court litigation, from 2004 to 2009.
Cruz was the Republican nominee for the Senate seat vacated by fellow Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison.[8] On July 31, 2012, he defeated Lieutenant Governor David Dewhurst in the Republican primary runoff, 57–43.[9] Cruz defeated the Democrat, former state Representative Paul Sadler, in the general election held on November 6, 2012; he prevailed with 56–41 over Sadler.[9][10] Cruz openly identifies with the Tea Party movement, and has been endorsed by the Republican Liberty Caucus.[11] On November 14, 2012, Cruz was appointed vice-chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, the committee that seeks to elect more Republicans to the Senate.[12]
He was the first Hispanic Solicitor General in Texas,[7][13] the youngest Solicitor General in the United States,[7][14] and the longest-serving Solicitor General in Texas’ history.[15] Cruz is one of three Latinos in the Senate; the others — also Americans of Cuban ancestry — are fellow Republican Marco Rubio of Florida and Democrat Bob Menendez of New Jersey.[16]
Cruz was born on December 22, 1970[2][10] in Calgary, Alberta, Canada[2][17] where his parents, Eleanor Elizabeth Darragh Wilson[17][18][19][20][21][22] and Rafael Bienvenido Cruz,[20][21] were working in the oil business.[23][24] His parents owned a seismic-data processing firm for oil drillers.[20][25] Cruz’s father, who was born in 1939 in Matanzas, Cuba,[20][21] as Robert T. Garrett of the Dallas Morning News has described, “suffered beatings and imprisonment for protesting the oppressive regime”[20][25] of dictator Fulgencio Batista. He fought for Fidel Castro in the Cuban Revolution[26][27] when he was 14 years old, but “didn’t know Castro was a Communist.” A few years later he became a staunch critic of Castro when “the rebel leader took control and began seizing private property and suppressing dissent.”[20][28] The elder Cruz fled Cuba in 1957, two years before the revolution, at the age of 18, landing in Austin,[25]a Cuban émigré, to study at the University of Texas, knowing no English and with $100 sewn into his underwear.[29][30] His younger sister fought in the counter-revolution and was tortured by the new regime.[27] He remained regretful for his early support of Castro, and emphatically conveyed this remorse to his young son over the following years.[20][27] The elder Cruz worked his way through college as a dishwasher, making 50 cents an hour,[19] earning a degree in mathematics.[25] Cruz’s father is a pastor in Carrollton, Texas,[18] a Dallas suburb, and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2005.[21]
Cruz’s mother was born and raised in Wilmington, Delaware,[21] in a family of Irish and Italian descent.[19][24] She was the first person in her family to attend college. She earned an undergraduate degree in mathematics from Rice University in Houston in the 1950s, working summers at Foley’s and Shell Oil.[31] She later worked in Houston as a computer programmer at Shell.[25] Cruz has said, “I’m Cuban, Irish, and Italian, and yet somehow I ended up Southern Baptist.”[5]
Cruz’s parents returned to Houston in 1974, after working in the Alberta oil fields, when a slump hit the price of oil and they sold their first seismic data company.[18] They divorced while Cruz was in law school.[25]
Cruz attended high school at Faith West Academy in Katy, Texas,[32] and later graduated from Second Baptist High School in Houston as valedictorian in 1988.[18] During high school, Cruz participated in a Houston-based group called the Free Market Education Foundation where Cruz learned about free-market economic philosophers such as Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, Frédéric Bastiat and Ludwig von Mises.[27] The program was run by Rolland Storey and Cruz entered the program at the age of 13.[25]
Cruz graduated cum laude from Princeton University with a Bachelor of Arts degree from the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs in 1992.[2][7] While at Princeton, he competed for the American Whig-Cliosophic Society’s Debate Panel and won the top speaker award at both the 1992 U.S. National Debating Championship and the 1992 North American Debating Championship.[33] In 1992, he was named U.S. National Speaker of the Year and Team of the Year (with his debate partner, David Panton).[33] Cruz was also a semi-finalist at the 1995 World Universities Debating Championship, making him Princeton’s highest-ranked debater at the championship.[34][35] Princeton’s debate team later named their annual novice championship after Cruz.[34]
Cruz’s senior thesis on the separation of powers, titled “Clipping the Wings of Angels,” draws its inspiration from a passage attributed to President James Madison: “If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary.” Cruz argued that the drafters of the Constitution intended to protect the rights of their constituents, and the last two items in the Bill of Rights offered an explicit stop against an all-powerful state. Cruz wrote: “They simply do so from different directions. The Tenth stops new powers, and the Ninth fortifies all other rights, or non-powers.”[31][36]
After graduating from Princeton, Cruz attended Harvard Law School, graduating magna cum laude in 1995 with a Juris Doctor degree.[2][37] While at Harvard Law, Cruz was a primary editor of the Harvard Law Review, and executive editor of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy, and a founding editor of the Harvard Latino Law Review.[7] Referring to Cruz’s time as a student at Harvard Law, Professor Alan Dershowitz said, “Cruz was off-the-charts brilliant.”[19][38][39][40][41][42] At Harvard Law, Cruz was a John M. Olin Fellow in Law and Economics.[43]
Cruz currently serves on the Board of Advisors of the Texas Review of Law and Politics.[43][44]
Clerkships
Cruz served as a law clerk to J. Michael Luttig of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit in 1995[13][43] and William Rehnquist, Chief Justice of the United States in 1996.[2] Cruz was the first Hispanic to clerk for a Chief Justice of the United States.
Private practice
After Cruz finished his clerkships, he took a position with Cooper, Carvin & Rosenthal, which is now known as Cooper & Kirk, LLC, from 1997 to 1998.[46] While with the firm, Cruz worked on matters relating to the National Rifle Association, and helped prepare testimony for the impeachment proceedings against President Clinton.[47] Cruz also served as private counsel for Congressman John Boehner during Boehner’s lawsuit against Congressman Jim McDermott for releasing a tape recording of a Boehner telephone conversation.[48]
Bush Administration[edit]
Cruz joined the George W. Bush presidential campaign in 1999 as a domestic policy adviser, advising then-Governor George W. Bush on a wide range of policy and legal matters, including civil justice, criminal justice, constitutional law, immigration, and government reform.[46]
Cruz assisted in assembling the Bush legal team, devise strategy, and draft pleadings for filing with the Supreme Court of Florida and U.S. Supreme Court, the specific case being Bush v. Gore, during the 2000 Florida presidential recounts, leading to two successful decisions for the Bush team.[43][49] Cruz recruited future Chief Justice John Roberts and noted attorney Mike Carvin to the Bush legal team.[47]
After President Bush took office, Cruz served as an associate deputy attorney general in the U.S. Justice Department[2][49] and as the director of policy planning at the U.S. Federal Trade Commission.[2][19][49]
Texas Solicitor General
Appointed to the office of Solicitor General of Texas by Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott,[13][50] Cruz served in that position from 2003 to 2008.[27][43] The office had been established in 1999 under to handle appeals involving the state, but Abbott hired Cruz with the idea that Cruz would take a “leadership role in the United States in articulating a vision of strict construction.” As Solicitor General, Cruz would argue before the Supreme Court nine times, winning five cases and losing four.[47]
Cruz has authored 70 United States Supreme Court briefs and presented 43 oral arguments, including nine before the United States Supreme Court.[13][19][29] Cruz’s record of having argued before the Supreme Court nine times is more than any practicing lawyer in Texas or any current member of Congress.[51] Cruz has commented on his nine cases in front of the U.S. Supreme Court: “We ended up year after year arguing some of the biggest cases in the country. There was a degree of serendipity in that, but there was also a concerted effort to seek out and lead conservative fights.”[51]
In the landmark case of District of Columbia v. Heller, Cruz drafted the amicus brief signed by attorneys general of 31 states, which said that the D.C. handgun ban should be struck down as infringing upon the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms.[29][52] 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.[29][53]
In addition to his success in Heller, Cruz has successfully defended the constitutionality of Ten Commandments monument on the Texas State Capitol grounds before the Fifth Circuit and the U.S. Supreme Court, winning 5-4 in Van Orden v. Perry.[19][29][43]
In 2004, Cruz was involved in the high-profile case, Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow,[19][43] in which Cruz wrote a U.S. Supreme Court brief on behalf of all 50 states.[54] The Supreme Court upheld the position of Cruz’s brief.
Cruz served as lead counsel for the state and successfully defended the multiple litigation challenges to the 2003 Texas congressional redistricting plan in state and federal district courts and before the U.S. Supreme Court, which was decided 5-4 in his favor in League of United Latin American Citizens v. Perry.[43][55]
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 cases of 51 Mexican nationals, all of whom were convicted of murder in the United States and were on death row.[13][19][29][43] With the support of the George W. Bush Administration, the International Court of Justice argued that the United States had violated a treaty by failing to notify the convicted nationals of their opportunity to receive legal aid from the Mexican consulate.[47] Texas won the case in a 6-3 decision.[47]
Cruz has been named by American Lawyer magazine as one of the 50 Best Litigators under 45 in America,[50][56] by The National Law Journal as one of the 50 Most Influential Minority Lawyers in America,[57][58] and by Texas Lawyer as one of the 25 Greatest Texas Lawyers of the Past Quarter Century.[59][60]
Private practice[edit]
After leaving the Solicitor General position in 2008, he worked in a private law firm in Houston, Morgan, Lewis & Bockius, often representing corporate clients, until he was sworn in a U.S. Senator from Texas in 2013.[31][43][61] At Morgan, Lewis, he led the firm’s U.S. Supreme Court and national appellate litigation practice.[61]
In 2009, while working for Morgan, Lewis, Cruz formed and then abandoned a bid for state attorney general when the incumbent Attorney General Greg Abbott, who hired Cruz as Solicitor General, decided to run for re-election.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Cruz
I do believe that Mitch had better learn to “GET ALONG WITH TED”. If push comes to shove, I think Ted will make mince meat out of MITCH
Cruz also served as private counsel for Congressman John Boehner during Boehner’s lawsuit against Congressman Jim McDermott for releasing a tape recording of a Boehner telephone conversation.
Didn’t know that. Must’ve missed it, before ;-)
Boehner gets ribbed about it by the presstitutes every now and then.
I suspect that too .. but I’ve already seen comments re: “crushing the Tea Party” .. and of course, Ted Cruz is their star .. and my favorite of all the Senators.
He’s got a few attributes that none of the other Senators don’t have; a steel spine; Debate Champion from Princeton and Harvard; his knowledge of the Constitution is unrivaled, and applauded by Dershewitz (his professor at law school); he was the Solicitor General of TX during the 2000 election - which would put him before the Supreme Court in re: Bush v. Gore (which tells me that every dem hates him for just that event alone). And .. HE LOVES AMERICA; A LOVE HE ACQUIRED FROM HIS FATHER WHO CAME HERE FROM CUBA. And .. he’s an unabashed Christian and supporter of LIFE.
In all the Senate, there just is nobody with all those skills. I just feel he is the very most qualified to be President at this difficult time in our history.
p.s. Nobody has to agree with me .. I don’t really give a rip .. he’s still the most qualified. The rest of the Senate are just standing around waiting to be Majority Leader (or doing the very least they have to do), and that is their only goal - they are the “next in line”. Sorry, it’s time to stop that high school stuff.
Well, I’m glad nobody told Esther: Sorry, but you’re not the next in line, you’re too young.
INSTEAD, SHE WAS TOLD, “Who’s to say YOU Weren’t BORN FOR SUCH A DAY AS THIS.”
WE NEED TED NOW, NOT TWENTY YEARS FROM NOW.
What on earth does that have to do with ANYTHING ..??????
LOL, that is a talent, for sure, but not necessarily intelligence.
Well, it's like this.....
2DV made a comment.
I commented on his comment.
Then Mrssmith commented on my comment on 2DV's comment.
Then I commented on her comment.
Them 2DV posted a Wiki article.
Things like that happen sometimes.
They don't know who we are. Nor what we're about.
By the same token, and in the same way, they don't know Senator Ted Cruz.
It amounts to a big advantage or our side...
Very impressive resume.
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