Posted on 03/27/2015 5:32:40 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
Long before Ted Cruz was a big-name senator and conservative rock star, wowing the crowd at Liberty University in the early days of his presidential bid, he was just another lawyer toiling away in virtual anonymity under George W. Bush.
While Cruz’s time in the Senate is best known for fiery speeches and high-profile gestures like his 21-hour filibuster, in his earlier time in Washington he demonstrated a wonkish eye for detail and an eagerness to take on powerful industry groups that he saw as stifling competition. Though his efforts ultimately succeeded on a much smaller scale than he’d initially envisioned, they demonstrated a relentless focus on repealing or preventing the passage of laws that he felt needlessly regulated the marketplace. If this early period of Cruz’s career is any guide, a Cruz presidency would feature a sustained push to roll back federal regulations, one where outcomes are measured carefully but where success may be less black-and-white than Cruz’s public comments since his election to the Senate might suggest.
Cruz spent a good portion of his early career working for President George W. Bush — first as a legal policy adviser to the Bush-Cheney campaign in 2000, then as part of the recount team in Florida. He was the Department of Justice coordinator for the Bush-Cheney transition team and then spent six months as Associate Deputy Attorney General at the DOJ. But his longest stretch of work for Bush was at the Federal Trade Commission, before he departed to become the Solicitor General of Texas.
From July 2001 to January 2003, Cruz was the director of the Office of Policy Planning at the FTC. There, he earned a reputation as a passionate boss intent on tracking the success of the office’s efforts in granular detail.
A memo written by Cruz and his deputy, Jerry Ellig, shortly before his departure to Texas included a chart of the office’s projects, his calculation of how successful each project had been, an estimate of the probability that decision-makers listened to the FTC, and an estimate of the probability of the same outcome without any advocacy or action from the FTC. (Cruz and Ellig concluded the FTC had influenced the outcome in eleven of the 14 projects that were not pending.)
Initially, Cruz proposed an ambitious agenda that featured efforts to roll back regulations on teacher certification, hospital accreditation, and local governments’ agreements with cable television.
“Recruiting good teachers could be made easier if the educational system adopted a more market-oriented approach, reducing the number of formal education-school requirements in order to increase the supply of teachers in critical specialties,” Cruz wrote in a July 2001 memo outlining a dozen policy areas for the FTC. He contended that eliminating those requirements would attract more teachers who had recently retired from another profession or the military, or who were interested in making a mid-life career change.
In the same July 2001 memo, Cruz also compared the primary professional organization that accredited U.S. hospitals, the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations, to a cartel:
The Joint Commission has a structure that would seem to be very worrisome in antitrust terms. The group includes virtually all horizontal competitors in the industry, and it has, in certification standards that are closely interwoven with state licensure requirements, a powerful enforcement mechanism to prevent cheating on cartel conduct.
The future senator went on to contend that the Joint Commission’s accreditation standards limited “patient choice without any apparent benefits for health or safety,” citing accreditation standards that limited some of the times and terms of family members’ visits to hospital patients.
Cruz also urged his colleagues to “look into possible anti-competitive exclusion of cable television companies.” He cited a report from the FTC’s San Francisco office of possible collusion between municipalities and cable companies. The municipalities would allegedly pass a tax or franchise fee on a cable company that was above the level permitted by federal law, which the incumbent cable company would then happily pay in exchange for local officials’ promise to reject all new entrants into the market, even if they offered better services or lower prices.
The bolder ideas in Cruz’s early memo, however, never came to fruition, as pressing cases and efforts in other policy areas ultimately took precedence. But Cruz’s work in these other policy areas did have an impact, and might prove to be useful experience in deterring what he sees as bad regulations in the future.
Cruz and the other FTC staff successfully defeated changes aimed at allowing competing physicians in Alaska and Washington to engage in collective bargaining with health plans over fees and other contract terms, arguing that the proposals would increase health-care costs and reduce access to care, without ensuring better outcomes for patients.
Cruz also weighed in on proposed New York and Virginia laws that aimed to restrict below-cost gasoline sales. Some state lawmakers contended that retailers selling gas for less than they’d paid for it represented a predatory effort by large corporations to force smaller businesses out of the market, by slashing prices so low that the smaller ones couldn’t compete.
But Cruz and the other FTC staff argued that the laws duplicated existing law and would discourage or even prevent competitive pricing. “New laws to limit price-cutting and prevent refiners from opening new gas stations are especially inappropriate at a time when many Americans are concerned about gasoline prices,” Cruz declared in August 2002. New York governor George Pataki pocket-vetoed the proposed law in February 2003.
A similar bill died in committee in Virginia.
Rolling back regulations has been a perennial promise of GOP presidential candidates for a generation. Every Republican presidential hopeful says he’ll cut red tape; very few make it a top priority once they’re in office. Cruz faces a steep climb to the nomination and the presidency. But if he can defy the odds and claim the White House, he’ll bring a level of hands-on experience with the regulatory state — and a proven zeal for cutting it down to size — that few, if any, of his predecessors could match.
Ronald Reagan. I know establishment types despise him.
Not automatically, but it means great lengths to prove it. Not every GOP president, but definitely the Bush administration now that it's evident that it was not conservative at all. And now that it's become clear most of the people in the administration who we thought were conservatives were left wingers masquerading as conservatives.
A famous conservative one said, "Trust but verify." You disagree?
Who do you suggest will please your idea of “conservative”?
*****
Ronald Reagan. I know establishment types despise him.
He may be. I am just say, “Trust but verify.” He has two black marks against him, as far as being a conservative. He served in the Bush administration and he serves in the Senate.
Ronald Reagan raised the Social Security contribution from 9% to 14%. He also granted AMNESTY to 5 million illegal aliens.
So don't tell me that Cruz is not acceptable because he once worked for GWB.
Ronald Reagan was a great president and a solid conservative, but if he were running today, people like you would be calling him a RINO.
Until the Conservative movement starts using Liberal tactics against them, we'll continue to get hammered, and lose.
It’s simple. Conservatives will unite behind a real conservative who also has a shot at winning or they’ll divide themselves again, nitpicking every conservative to death while the progressive rino again becomes our candidate.
Do you read English? That is not what I said. We should regard his having served in the administration with great suspicion. ANY candidate should be vetted to the utmost degree. Republicans can not be trusted. You are advocated that we elected presidents without knowing anything about them, Obama-style. Haven't you learned anything? Ronald Reagan was a great president and a solid conservative, but if he were running today, people like you would be calling him a RINO.
He made mistakes, but I don't agree with you that he was a RINO.
The GOP hasn't run a conservative in more than thirty years. Yet you claim we shouldn't vet candidates before we pick them. Sounds like Pelosi-ism. "We have to elect a candidate before we know if he's conservative." Sorry, ignorance is not conservatism.
He made a bad immigration deal with Democrats who reneged Reagan said it was one of his biggest regrets. Repubs who fail to learn from that are the big RINOs
Ted Cruz was Working for Bush, he was not the one making policy.
You can vet them all you want, but it appears to me that rather than "vet" candidates, you are on an Anti-Cruz Campaign.
This is Cruz country, my FRiend. Get used to being vetted yourself when you make silly arguments against him.
Eventually someone is going to have to compromise on this issue. Reagan had to because it was the only way to get control of the situation. Unfortunately he believed the other side.
The fact of the matter is that the problem has been created because the US has failed to enforce the law for the last 30 years and in essence we have invited illegal aliens to come here and raise families and take our jobs and collect benefits without any fear whatsoever. We have made our speed limit laws of more concern than our immigration laws and the fact of the matter is that nobody actually obeys speed limits because the benefits of speeding outweigh the consequences of having the possibility of being caught.
I am opposed to Amnesty of any kind, however I recognize that there is simply no way in the world we are going to be able to avoid it in the future.
The most important thing we can do is to secure the border and to deport everyone who is caught committing any prosecutable crime.
Start there and then make it impossible for people who came here illegally from ever voting or collecting welfare or food stamps or any other benefit from the welfare state.
But anyone who thinks that any candidate is going to put an immediate end to this problem is a DREAMER.
You are way out there. I have never said anything positive about any other candidate. Look at my posts, I am not anti-Cruz. But one bitten, twice shy. This is the period to verify conservatism. I hope Cruz is conservative, and I don’t see a better candidate them him. But he shouldn’t be given a free pass, either.
Just don't expect perfection. Ronald Reagan raised social security taxes on the self employed from 7% to 14% and he granted AMNESTY to 5 million illegal aliens.
Cruz is a solid conservative. If you can't see that, then you are blind. He's an announced candidate. I've signed on to volunteer on his campaign. Have you volunteered your services for any announced candidate? Oh wait, Cruz is the only candidate in the race right now. Everyone else is waiting for the results of their "exploratory committees".
OMG... what a radical! What would happen to all the state teachers colleges if people who just had the desire to teach kids in math, science, or even English didn't have to spend 10s of thousands of dollars on totally worthless post grad education classes to earn that privilege?
An entire level of the leftist bureaucracy would collapse, and kids would actually be exposed to teachers who could teach and actually wanted to teach.
Giving them amnesty will make it impossible to cut off the benefits
Congress has the power to create conditions for legal status of any immigrant. The current law prohibits Visa holders from getting on public assistance and those people are here legally. What Congress could do is to simply provide conditional Visas in lieu of amnesty and condition the Visa on ensuring that no one in the immigrant's family is a burden on the taxpayers. Those who don't sign on to the conditional Visa will be subject to deportation and those who sign on and then become a burden will be subject to deportation.
The fact of the matter is that probably less than 20% of illegal aliens would sign on anyway.
There is simply no way, with 30 million illegal aliens in this country, that we are going to solve the problem without some kind of compromise.
If you think otherwise then you are a DREAMER.
Would he be better if he worked for the Albert Gore Administration?
Let the other side compromise, or lose- novel concept to GOP types- cut off the bennies, they can return home or starve.
Many legal immigrants are on the dole, they call them refugees.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.